What is a short film?

The Oscar definition for a short film is "as an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits" 

 

Short films are commonly shorter than that however, ranging between 5 and 30 minutes. A short film will typically have a much lower budget than your average feature-length film, appearing grainy and of worse quality. The budget also places restrictions on the quality of actors and size of its crew, meaning jobs will often have to cross over behind the camera, making the nature of a short film a far more collaborative task. However, without the need to appeal to a mass audience and without the pressures of profit, there is more artistic freedom for short filmmakers to experiment and take a more art-house approach to filmmaking.

The time constraints do mean that there's less time to develop characters and narrative, and so the most effective and successful short films have a short, punchy and concise plot which  tends to pinpoint one specific idea in which the narrative is built around.

Short films, unlike features, aren’t as widely distributed and attract much smaller, niche audiences. They can generally be viewed on streaming platforms like Youtube and Vimeo, but are also shown at some film festivals around the world.