...a black hole: the laws of matter are reversed. - Katariina Lillqvist
...a poem: it takes big themes and distils them. Less is more. -ScreenEast
...poems. - Pertti Paltila
...a poem: brief, still highly literate, and capable of making ripples in the thought processes that far outlast the piece. -Robert Frazier
...a joke: it's pithy and it has a climax. -Michael Hannigan
...a good joke...a bit of a story, all related around the same thing, no tangent, and it ends on an up. -Rolin
...the beginning of the feature, it's gonna continue from there. -Royston Tan
...a scene. A scene that has a good beginning, middle, and end. In a long film youíre dealing with so many layers. -Andrea Dorfman
...your CV and you are giving snapshots of a film that could be told longer. -Aneel Ahmad
...a calling card to get noticed by Hollywood. - Selise Eiseman
...a dead baby in the river. -Mitch Davis
...a gate-pass. You show it around to people. -Sachin Kundalkar
...a short story and not a novel. -Luis Prieto.
...It is not a productive question, a short film is just that: a short film. Its form is not essential but its content. Short stories cannot be read thinking constantly the nature of a short story. That would be like walking and thinking, well, but what is a slipper. -Susanna Helke
"Short films are like..."
... theatre - they bring people together. -Blair Milan
...Skittles for the mind. Sure they're small, but you can eat a lot of them in no time at all. But take in too many of these insubstantial tidbits and you'll end up bloated, miserable, and malnourished. -Robert Strohmeyer
...haiku or comic strips, employing a narrative hole, or narrative absence. -Josh Gibson
...inappropriate gestures, physical actions or shouts in public spaces. -Ruth Catlow
...roots of full-length films. -Kim Jun-Yeon
...learning your scales. -Peter John Ross
...5 seconds of a sniper shooting someone or something to that effect.
... small but brilliant, rough diamonds, and are like a blueprint of the image industry's future. -Tetsuya Bessho