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Extra Curricular
by Holly Willis
Life, Compressed: Austin Bunn’s Short Film Screenwriting: A Craft Guide and Anthology
Familiarity is where short films go to die.
So says Austin Bunn, rephrasing a statement by the British-Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa, who feels that the abundance of shorts characterizing our moment makes playing it safe as a screenwriter the biggest risk of all.
Boulifa is just one of many filmmakers cited in Bunn’s new book, Short Film Screenwriting: A Craft Guide and Anthology, published in October 2024 by Bloomsbury. Bunn may be best known to Filmmaker readers as the co-author, with Christine Vachon, of 2007’s A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond. A fiction writer, screenwriter, filmmaker and associate professor in the department of performing and media arts at Cornell University, he has been teaching university classes as well as leading workshops and offering craft talks on short-form filmmaking for many years, all of which contribute to creating a smart, practical and highly informative book designed to help writers master the short form and take risks artistically.
In the book’s opening chapter, Bunn argues for the relevance of his subject matter, reminding us that “the history of film is a history of the short film.” Bunn is referencing the origins of cinema and films such as Georges Méliès’ magical A Trip to the Moon from 1902. He points to other iconic shorts such as Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, Chris Marker’s La Jetée and George Lucas’s Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB and lists filmmakers whose careers were launched by great shorts including Damien Chazelle, Taika Waititi, Dee Rees and Jennifer Kent. He then tackles the current context for short-form filmmaking in the United States, writing as an active filmmaker and screenwriter as much as a film professor. He knows the festival scene and understands how to talk to funders and producers. Bunn gets how the business works, knowledge that shows in his framing and practicality. Plus, because it’s adapted from his many craft talks, the book is conversational and thus eminently readable.
In the next three chapters, Bunn shows how writers need to mobilize each element of screenplay form—slug lines, action lines and dialogue—with power and grace. He also offers five metaphors for screenplays that can help guide one’s screenwriting, along with several very useful frameworks. These include a handy recipe for a successful logline, the five qualities that make an effective short film premise and the basic structure for a powerful narrative short. The information here is clear, grounded, specific and, well, exhilarating: every chapter is actionable.
The latter part of the book offers six chapters that develop specific facets of a great screenplay, such as the need to develop rich, multi-dimensional characters. This may seem obvious, but Bunn acknowledges—and then moves deftly around—the paradox of developing a character’s inner life in a medium that only presents exterior reality in the form of actions and dialogue for the camera. He beautifully re-tools the idea of journey and character arc for a 10-minute film, underscores the power of voice, touches on less traditional story forms and dissects the revision process. All of this is gold and incites a rush of possibility.
However, what makes the book truly useful is that it includes 18 full screenplays for shorts such as Ingrid Jungermann’s F to 7th and Erica Tremblay’s Little Chief, letting readers see the actual pages that Bunn references in his analyses. Bouncing between instruction and clear examples, readers are privy to tangible evidence of Bunn’s guidance and can see how other writers have successfully mastered character, journey, voice and form.
I asked Bunn, who currently teaches a two-course sequence at Cornell on writing the short film, what most challenges newcomers. “It’s the ‘Inner Life’ chapter that feels the most radical and perplexing for newer screenwriters,” he says. “Film and media are the terrain of exterior life: everything must be perceived visually (or sonically) to be understood by an audience. At the same time, the best characters have a rich inner life (desires, hopes, fears, habits, fixations, and the most satisfying climaxes come less from the resolution of external conflict and more from genuine choice (the resolution of an inner conflict) and perception shift (a discovery that happens inside the protagonist and audiences at the same time) leading to catharsis.”
Bunn adds that he sees some gender biases in responses to investigating the inner life as well. “Forgive some arm-chair speculation,” he says, “but I think many young men are drawn to screenwriting because it is creative writing about action. Physical, external reality: who is where, what happens, who says what.” He goes on to add, “This ‘inner life’ component of strong characters is new for them; I know it was for me, as I describe in the book.”
Bunn finds the opposite to be the case for many women writers. “Young women, in my experience, are often drawn to creative writing expressly for that interiority and personhood. (Enrollment in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction classes—which focus on this aspect—is majority female.) It’s both interesting and easy for them to inhabit another perspective. They are seeking to develop their verbs—the actions and choices that drive a cinematic story.”
Asked about the future of the short at this vexing moment in cinema history, Bunn points to the work of Jason Sondhi at Short of the Week. “He does a fantastic job tracking developments in short film, and I read [the site’s] weekly newsletter closely.”
Bunn then offers his own take: “As the tools get easier to use—and camera gear increasingly affordable—I think we’ll be seeing more very personal animated films (like My Year of Dicks), high quality VFX (and AI visuals) in no-budget shorts, increasing formal experimentation like blended documentary/narrative shorts or narrative music videos and an increasing (and burdensome) expectation for high production value (color grading, great sound design).”
All of this sounds promising! While we can fret about shortened attention spans and speculate over the economics that make independent filmmaking so challenging, Bunn’s book redirects us to the art and craft of the short form, reminding us that we crave stories because we desire characters who serve as our proxies for connection, struggle and transformation. “We laugh and shudder and weep at their expense, learning from their experiences without ever having to pay the price.” Yes, this description of catharsis takes us back to Aristotle, but Bunn’s book takes readers —and writers—forward. Short Film Screenwriting presents many familiar tropes of screenplay form—the journey, character arc, transformation—but they are brilliantly tuned to the compressed, challenging and quite specific artform of the short screenplay. This makes the book an incredibly useful tool for writers willing to face the challenge of transforming life into 10-minute moments of magic.
