The 24-Minute Film Format: Why Shorts Got Longer

You know how pop songs got shorter because streaming pays per play? Short films went the opposite direction. They're getting longer.

Longer? In the age of people scrolling past anything over nine seconds?

Longer. In twenty twenty-five, three of the five Oscar-nominated animated shorts ran nineteen minutes or more. Some are brushing up against thirty, which is the maximum runtime at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.

Okay, so what even counts as short at that point? Thirty minutes is a sitcom with ads.

That's the whole question. So let's do four things: what a short actually is as a form, why the runtimes crept up, what it costs festivals, and the money logic underneath it all.

My honest assumption is that a short is just a feature that ran out of budget.

That's the most common belief and it's wrong. Richard Raskin, who writes about short film theory, draws a hard line. A short film, to him, runs under ten minutes, and it's its own art form.

Its own art form how? Story is story.

Not quite. In a short, there may be no conflict between characters at all. The lead usually doesn't transform, no character arc. Instead you get character moments, decisive choices that change their situation. And wordless storytelling is a genuine option.

Huh. Every screenwriting book I've skimmed says conflict is non-negotiable.

Which is exactly his point of contention. And he has a name for that twenty-five to forty minute thing people keep calling a short. In Scandinavia it's a novellefilm. He says it's essentially a miniature feature.

There's no English word for it?

There isn't. Which is part of why everything gets dumped into one bucket called "short".

So why did the bucket start stretching? Did audiences ask for it?

Partly it's software. Tomek Popakul, who made the short Zima, says once you've paid to model your characters and environments in 3D, adding more seconds is relatively flexible. His motion capture work loops actions, so longer sequences cost almost nothing extra.

Oh, that's a genuinely different economics than film stock.

Completely. Another animator, Šuljić, described the old Zagreb Film studios, where film was expensive and every second counted. Directors were careful not to prolong scenes. Now, he says, it's easy to leave a shot one or two seconds longer.

And it compounds.

His line is that those seconds add up and you end up with a film that's ten to twenty percent too long. Steven Subotnick, who teaches at Rhode Island School of Design, says the same thing: the old medium was cumbersome, and that limited screen time.

So the discipline wasn't taste. It was the invoice.

The invoice enforced the taste. Take the invoice away and the restraint is optional.

Does it actually hurt anyone, though? Longer film, fine.

Here's where it bites. Festivals have fixed hours in fixed rooms. The Ottawa festival showed eighty-four shorts in twenty fourteen. Guess roughly where that number landed in twenty twenty-three.

Sixty? Things don't usually halve.

Forty. A record low, and that's the year Zima, Electra and Antipolis all competed.

So a handful of long films ate everyone else's slots.

Festivals run on tight schedules and budgets. You can't just bolt on more screenings. So programming longer films costs you variety, fewer voices, fewer styles in front of that audience.

That's a tragedy of the commons. Rational for each filmmaker, bad for all of them.

And individually rational is right, because there's real upside. A long short lets you practise extended storytelling, pacing, deeper characters, without the stakes of a feature.

Which I assume is the actual business plan. The short is the sales pitch.

There's a well-established short-to-feature pipeline. Whiplash was a twenty thirteen short before the twenty fourteen feature. Shiva Baby started as a twenty eighteen thesis project and became the twenty twenty feature.

So the short is a proof of concept you show to people with money.

Exactly that, and the filmmakers say the craft barely differs. One of them, Zaman, put it as: the funding, the preparation, the life the film has afterwards, that's all different. The creative process isn't as different as people make out.

Does anyone actually pay for a short, though?

Barely. Screen Australia's guidance is blunt: unless you're pulling very strong numbers, there isn't much money in shorts. Some platforms pay a flat fee, YouTube gives you an ad cut, most social platforms pay nothing, and festivals charge YOU to enter.

Wait, you pay to submit?

Typically twenty to a hundred dollars per festival. Submit widely and you're out hundreds or a few thousand before anyone's seen a frame.

So the payoff is attention, not revenue.

Right, so try this. You've got a twenty-four minute animated piece. A YouTube short-film channel offers to post it this month. What's your worry?

That it burns my premiere. Festivals and broadcasters might not take something that's already been online.

That's the trap. Screen Australia warns about exactly that, and the Academy's live action short rules are stricter still: no streaming, broadcast or internet release before the qualifying theatrical run. Only up to fifteen percent of the running time.

So you can tease a trailer and that's it. You choose one door.

You choose one door. And at twenty-four minutes you're also the expensive guest at every festival you apply to.

Whereas a tight eight-minute one slides into any programme.

So: shorts under ten minutes are a distinct form, not baby features. Digital tools removed the cost of extra seconds. Festivals pay for that in slots. And the money mostly isn't in the short, it's in what the short unlocks.

What's the opposite extreme? Someone must be enforcing brevity.

Filminute. Sixty seconds, no more, no less, credits included. Go watch a few of those back to back with a thirty-minute one.

One of those nights is considerably shorter.