For filmmakers and festival entrants
Short Film
One idea, delivered clean, in under thirty minutes.
A short film demands economy: a single strong idea, executed without waste, inside a runtime you can count in minutes. Screenburn helps you find that idea and build every scene in its service.
Economy first
The short earns its keep when every scene, line, and image serves the central idea. Screenburn's questionnaire makes you state what the film is about in one sentence before you write anything else, then holds each scene against that sentence. What fails the test goes.
Structure by runtime
A three-minute short and a twenty-five-minute short carry different structures. Screenburn adapts its guidance to your target band: under 5 minutes, 5 to 15, or 15 to 30, so the shape fits the slot you are writing for, festival or feed.
Written to be shot
Most short filmmakers shoot their own scripts. Screenburn keeps production reality in the frame: lean locations, small casts, and a structure you can shoot on real weekends with a real budget.
What you get
- ✓One-idea development discipline
- ✓Structure bands: under 5, 5 to 15, 15 to 30 minutes
- ✓Festival-standard formatting
- ✓Production-aware guidance
- ✓Character economy prompts
- ✓Prompts that push image over exposition
Ready to write?
Screenburn is free to start. No credit card required.
The short lands one blow
A short film gets minutes where a feature gets hours, and the clock is the whole discipline. No subplot shelter. No second act to rescue things in the edit. Every frame either strikes or steals, and the audience feels the theft long before the credits.
Great shorts carry one idea and drive it home. One turn, one revelation, one image the film exists to deliver. A feature braids four threads; a short pulls a single thread until it sings. Choose your one thing, then guard it from every clever notion that asks to ride along.
Two failures account for most dead shorts. The mini-feature opens slow, seats seven characters, and asks a three-act shape to fit a fifteen-minute frame. The vignette shoots a beautiful moment that never turns. Dodge both: drop in late, and make sure something changes before you get out.
Plan the final shot first. Once you know the last image, every scene before it earns its keep by loading that moment. Trim the runway. Open with the idea already in motion and let the motion do the explaining.
Programmers read shorts like tarot cards. A seven-minute film that lands one idea with control says more about your future than a sprawling ninety ever could; voice and restraint outshout budget in that room. Careers start on films this size.
Write toward the final frame and clear the shortest path to it. Screenburn keeps the single idea in your sights from premise to last page, so the short stays short and lands the blow you built it to throw.
Put it to work
An account takes a minute, and the free tier is a working tool. No credit card.