The Pigeon: Impossible Blog

The hardest part about shorts is usually keeping them short. Its so easy for things to get longer and stretch out, so I thought I’d do a series of posts about one of the greatest tools short filmmakers have at their disposal: 3 act structure. Most of the time people talk about act structure in relation to features, but it’s just as applicable to shorts. Basically…

• Act 1 is the setup, and takes 25% of the running time.
• Act 2 is the confrontation, and takes 50% of the running time.
• Act 3 is the resolution, and takes the remaining 25% of the running time.

So today lets talk about Act 1. In shorts, this is hands down the hardest part to get right because there is a LOT that needs to happen in a very short amount of time. You need to establish the world/genre, the characters, what they want, the conflict and the tone. By the end of act 1, the audience needs to know everything that’s crucial to the rest of the story. After I get through these posts I’ll do a breakdown of several shorts, but for now I’ll just use PI as an example.

Since PI is roughly 6 minutes long (usually you don’t include credits in the act breakdowns) the first 25% is 1:30. If you watch the film, you’ll notice that right around 1:30, the pigeon gets inside the briefcase. Everything up until that point encompasses the setup…

The genre/world is established in several ways. First, the music is reminiscent of early spy-fi music. Its set in Washington DC, the largest hub for spies in the world. The graphic design uses a circle following the main character walking, an homage to James Bond. Also, Once we go into the title sequence, the images shift to a high-tech motif, showing that there is some sort of technology angle to the spy genre.

The characters in shorts tend to be very simple and not too deep, but its still important to establish their personality before things get going. Walter starts off looking cool, then immediately reveals that he’s a bit incompetent because instead of the James Bond “turning to shoot” moment, he turns at the honk of a car to realize that he’s standing in the middle of oncoming traffic. This klutziness carries through the rest of the establishing shot, until he receives the briefcase which confirms that he’s some sort of spy.

The pigeon’s personality is set up when he begs for the bagel. Walter gives him a piece, but he wants the whole bagel. That shows that he’s more aggressive than most pigeons, a little greedy, and possibly a bit smarter as well. This moment actually pulls triple duty, because in addition to setting up the character, it also shows what he wants (the bagel.)

The “what the characters want” beat is often the most difficult to nail. Sometimes filmmakers are a bit worried about being too “on the nose” and spelling things out to clearly, but in my experience, this is the one case where you can never be too on the nose. If the audience doesn’t know what the character wants, then their actions for the rest of the movie aren’t going to make sense.

The third thing that the pigeon/bagel moment does is establish the tone. After all, the movie is a comedy, so if you don’t have at least one good joke in the first act, the audience isn’t going to be on board. If you were doing a thriller, you’d probably set it up with suspenseful music and eerie cinematography. Whatever it is, the tone needs to be established up front.

Another important thing that needs to go into the first act is what Walter wants. We know that he’s on some sort of a mission, but it needs to be something specific that we can clearly follow. In this case, the briefcase takes on that role. We also have to establish that the briefcase is capable of some pretty cool stuff, so the interior was designed to have some superfluous movement of the control surfaces, just to give it that high-tech gadget feel. We don’t have to know everything it can do, just an idea of what its capable of, and that Walter is in big trouble if he loses it.

And then of course the last thing to set up is the conflict. There’s all sorts of structures for this, but the two crucial pieces are an antagonist, and an obstacle standing in the way of what the character wants. If this were a kung fu movie, the antagonist and the obstacle might be the same, but in PI, the conflict comes from the pigeon being in control of what Walter needs, and Walter being in control of what the pigeon needs.

Phew, that’s a lot to fit into 90 seconds of screen time, especially if you’re trying to make it feel smooth and natural, but that’s why making a short is so hard. A good way to think of it is like loading a cannon. The setups… who the characters are, what they want, etc. are all the individual pieces that go into the cannon… wadding, gunpowder, ball and fuse. The conflict is like lighting the fuse. Without conflict, that cannon isn’t going to fire, but without any of the pieces, its not going to work either. If you do it right, everything will be clear and the audience will be on board, then the rest of the film can focus on the interesting stuff: what happens after the cannon fires.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 19th, 2010 at 11:44 am and is filed under Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.