Your Short Film Needs a Side Hustle

My son’s just about to shoot another short film at SCAD. Seven minutes. High concept. Shot on a Netflix approved camera. Three point lighting. But when I asked what’ll happen to it after they turn it in, he gave me that film school shrug. "Submit it to festivals, I guess?"

Back when I was breaking into features in the early 90s, a festival-winning short could open doors. You'd get a call from an agent or some producer who saw it at Sundance. Those days? Gone. The internet ate them. Now festivals are for profit and stacked with star studded indies.

Everyone with an iPhone thinks they're making the next Soderbergh or Boyle flick, and the sheer volume of content has made standing out almost impossible. YouTube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Your beautiful seven-minute character study is competing with cat flushing toilet videos and UFO conspiracy docs (My playlist of choice).

So if you're going to pour your time, money, and creative energy into a short film for a class, why not make it capable of doing more than collecting dust on Vimeo?

Nobody Reads Anymore

Let me tell you the inconvenient truth that should terrify every screen scribbler: most executives don't read anymore.

I'm serious. They won't commit to 110 pages unless something has already convinced them it's worth the time. I've watched this shift happen over the past decade. Reading a full script feels like homework, and they've got twelve other projects screaming for attention. Not to mention the meetings about meetings and creating a cozy culture.

But a five-minute video? That they might watch. Especially if it shows up in their TikTok feed while they're supposed to be working.

Look at what happened with The Backrooms. Kane Parsons was a teenager making creepy liminal space videos on YouTube. No film school, no connections, just a kid with Blender and a vision. His videos went viral, racked up millions of views, and now A24 is making it into a feature with him directing. He's 18 years old.

He didn't write a script and pray someone would read it. He made the world visible. He proved the concept worked by putting it directly in front of an audience. When A24 came calling, they weren't buying a pitch. They were buying something that already existed and already had fans.

That's your new playbook.

One Short, Three Wins

I'm going to share the strategy I wish someone had taught me when I was cranking out specs and praying someone would read them. One short. Three completely different functions.

Job One: Show Them the Movie in Your Head

Pick a contained sequence from your feature script. Not some random idea, an actual scene that lives inside your bigger story. Shoot it with real production value.

When you show it to producers, you're not saying "I can direct." You're saying "This is the movie. Right here."

Damien Chazelle did this with Whiplash. He shot that brutal drum lesson scene as a short first. Same actors, same intensity. When he walked into meetings, he didn't pitch a jazz movie. He showed them the opening of his feature, fully realized. That short won Sundance. The feature won three Oscars.

David Sandberg made Lights Out as a two-minute horror short that went viral. Studio execs watched it, shat themselves, and gave him money to expand it into a feature that made $148 million. These aren't the exceptions. The examples abound. Let this be your playbook.

Job Two: Bypass the Gatekeepers Entirely

Platforms like YouTube and TikTok are starving for strong narrative content. The algorithm is your new gatekeeper, and it doesn't give a plumber’s crack about your MFA. So, why let your short sit in some festival programmer's inbox when it could be auditioning for millions of eyeballs right now?

My ADD brain goes crazy for this kind of pattern recognition. The same executives who won't read your script? They scroll social media. If they stumble across your story while mindlessly browsing at 11 PM, you've bypassed the slush pile and phone sheet entirely.

And if your short finds an audience organically, you've got something better than a BS festival standing Ol. You've got proof people actually give a damn about your story.

Job Three: Have an Answer When They Ask 'What's Next?'

Festivals still matter for some things. Don’t they? Maybe. Could be true. But when your short gets attention, producers are going to ask three questions:

Do you have a feature script? Can this story expand? Do you have a plan?

If you've got the script and pitch deck ready, you're not just showing Hollywood you’ve got talent. You're showing the money machers a business plan they can actually invest in.

During my years scribbling features before I got into TV, I learned this the hard way. I'd sell specs to studios, get paid to do assignments, and watch them die in development. What I didn't have was a way to show them the movie I saw in my head.

The only flick I ever had produced was a flick called Eight Legged Freaks. And yup, it was based on a short film made by a kid from New Zealand. They even let him direct it!

If I could go back and tell 1995 Jesse anything, it would be this: stop scribbling blind specs and start shooting scenes from them. Make the movie visible before asking someone from the jock cadre who threw milk cartons at you in the high school hallway to imagine it.

The Multi-Tool Mindset

Think about what you're getting from one strategically crafted short:

A pillar of your feature that lives inside the bigger story. A standalone piece that finds its own audience online. A proof-of-concept that gets industry folks to actually read your script.

Even if none of those tracks explode, you've still gained experience, sharpened your craft, and created something real you can share. No wasted effort.

This is how my brain works when I'm building worlds for games like VALORANT. Every piece of content, every character trailer, every bit of environmental storytelling has to serve multiple functions. It can't just look cool. It has to pull its weight.

Stop Hoping, Start Building

This is the mindset shift I want every scribbler to make: don't think of your short films as lottery tickets hoping to get noticed. Think of them all as strategic career moves.

In a world where attention is the rarest resource, your short needs to work harder than just looking cool or completing the assignment to earn a grade nobody cares about. It needs to open doors, start conversations, and cut through an avalanche of competing content.

Your time is precious. Your budget is nonexistent. So why not make every frame pull its weight?