For our inaugural No Budget Summer Film Workshop in 2023, we dared a group of 12 young filmmakers to develop short films in the span of a single week.

Creativity feeds off of constraints so each filmmaking crew was challenged to incorporate 3 constraints into their stories:

Character Archetype: Monster or Ghost

Monsters and ghosts have been part of cinematic storytelling since the beginning. Technically, even before the beginning when prehistoric cave dwellers would paint monsters on the walls of their caves and animate them with the flicker of their torchlight. Monsters and ghosts can be metaphors for a whole slew of abstract ideas: the unknown, the misunderstood, the otherworldly, memories of the past, traumas, ancestors, or our deepest desires...

Sound Effect: A Ticking Clock

What's more dramatic and anxiety-inducing than a constantly ticking clock? Whether it be used to punctuate a quickly approaching deadline, to depict a gradual or substantial passage of time, or as an anchor to the reality of the film's world while a character gets lost in the metaphysical, the sound of a ticking clock can have a tremendous amount of utility in order to elicit an emotional response from an audience... 

Editing Technique: The Jump Cut

A jump cut is a film editing technique that splits a continuous shot into multiple parts by removing footage, which creates a jump forward in time. Unlike other techniques, it is not meant to feel smooth or go unnoticed. It purposefully violates space, fragments action, and creates an ellipsis in time. It was initially "discovered" as an accidental edit by George Méliès in 1908 and has become a permanent part of moving image grammar, shown all over TikTok and YouTube vlogs, used to startle an audience during a horror movie, to grant a window into the frantic mentality of a character, or to simply show the passage of time during the story...

The reviews are in!

“I appreciated the freedom.”