Thinking about shooting a short film? Try a long ad instead

Directors love making short films. Understandable, as they’re a fine way to flex the filmmaking muscles. 

But a serious misperception has arisen in our industry; that these short films will help a director get advertising work. The reality is, they probably won’t.

A serious misperception has arisen in our industry; that short films will help a director get advertising work.

Short films are definitely a valid calling-card for movies. Let’s go back in time: Damien Chazelle got Whiplash made off the back of a short film. Sofia Coppola shot a 14-minute black-and-white film called Lick the Star in 1998, then directed The Virgin Suicides the following year. 

Martin McDonagh, meanwhile, director of In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and The Banshees of Inisherin, made his directorial debut with the short film Six Shooter in 2004.

Above: Martin McDonagh's directorial debut, the 2004 short film, Six Shooter. 

But as a tool for winning advertising work, short films aren’t great. It’s true that shooting a short film may help a director to get signed by a production company at the very beginning of their career, since production company bosses are film-storytelling experts who can usually tell, from a single short, whether a director has the chops, and whether the s/he offers something that would fit their company’s needs. 

Most creatives simply don’t have the bandwidth to watch anything over 60 seconds.

But, once signed, that director would still find themselves at square one, since the production company still needs to pitch them to ad agency creatives, and most creatives simply don’t have the bandwidth to watch anything over 60 seconds. Even if they do watch the whole of a short film, and love it, they immediately wonder if the director has the right sensibilities to compress a story to a 30-second format. 

The best approach for directors looking to super-charge their advertising career is almost certainly to shoot ‘spec’ ad scripts. 

Above: Harold Einstein has built a successful career in part from a hilarious spec campaign for Crest toothpaste.

US director Harold Einstein broke into the industry with a hilarious spec campaign for Crest toothpaste. He shot three ads, each 45-seconds long, which gave him plenty of scope to show what he could do as a filmmaker. And the mock spots were incredibly popular with agency creatives because of their deadpan style and iconoclastic humour – they even won Gold at Cannes. Einstein has gone on to build a stellar career, which includes directing this year’s brilliant Reese’s Super Bowl spot that holds up to multiple repeat viewings.

Harold Einstein broke into the industry with a hilarious spec campaign for Crest toothpaste.

Australian comedy director Tom Noakes got his start with the magnificently quirky Finger Cleaner spec ad for Doritos, which has earned seven million views since going live in 2014. Before the Doritos spot, Noakes had shot award-winning short films (have any short films been made which are not award-winning?) Julian in 2007, and Mongrel's Creed in 2010. They garnered little attention. 

Above: Tom Noakes' spec spot for Doritos earned its director millions of views and a burgeoning career. 

The sad truth is, even the best short films are not particularly popular. An Irish Goodbye, winner of the Oscar for Best Short Film in 2023, has only 50,000 views on YouTube, as does the 2020 winner, a beautifully sensitive piece of filmmaking called The Neighbors’ Window.

The sad truth is, even the best short films are not particularly popular.

The Long Goodbye, a truly exceptional 12 minutes of cinema directed by Aneil Karia and starring Riz Ahmed won the short film Oscar in 2022, but has just 1.2m views. To put that into context, people are more excited to watch ads – as long as they’re good ads – than they are to watch the absolute best short film of the year. 

For example, Old Spice’s The Man Your Man Could Smell Like gained 5.6 million YouTube views on its first day alone. That’s more than decades worth of Oscar-winning short films in just 24 hours. And in the 14 years since its release, Old Spice has gone on to rack up a total of 62 million plays. Meanwhile, the Dollar Shave Club launch ad has scored 28 million views, and Dumb Ways to Die has been watched an insane 303 million times.