Nobody Is Waiting for Your Short Film

Why finding the right way to talk about a film matters.

When you’ve spent two or three years making a short film, it’s very easy to forget that almost nobody else knows it exists.

You have read the screenplay hundreds of times. You’ve discussed every character, every location and every edit. The title has appeared in thousands of emails. You’ve watched the film so often that you know exactly when someone is going to laugh, when the music starts and how many seconds there are before the final cut to black.

And then the film is finished.

You put out a poster, release a trailer and announce that the film is finally here. And the rest of the world carries on with its day.

That sounds slightly depressing, but I actually think it’s a useful place to start when thinking about film marketing. Because nobody is waiting for your short film.

And why should they be? They don’t know it yet.

Our job isn’t to tell people how much work went into making it, or convince them that it’s important. It’s to give them a reason to become curious.

What will someone remember?

As filmmakers, we’re trained to think about everything that makes a film complex. Marketing often requires us to do the opposite.

If someone sees your poster for three seconds, what do you want them to remember?

If a programmer asks what you’re working on over a drink, what do you tell them?

If someone watches ten seconds of your trailer without sound, is there something that makes them stop?

These aren’t necessarily questions about what the film means. They’re questions about what makes the film distinctive. And those two things are easily confused.

A film might ultimately be about loneliness, grief, identity or the fear of losing someone. But there are thousands of films about loneliness, grief, identity and loss. The question is what makes this one different.

That might be an unusual premise. A face. An image. A world we haven’t seen before. A contradiction. A question we suddenly want answered.

Finding that doesn’t diminish the complexity of the film. It gives people a way into it.

The way into a film doesn’t have to be what the film is about

I think filmmakers sometimes resist the idea of a hook because it sounds reductive. After spending years creating something nuanced, reducing it to a sentence or image can feel almost disrespectful.

But the thing that makes someone curious about a film doesn’t have to contain everything the film eventually becomes. It only has to open the door.

In fact, some of the best marketing creates a slight gap between what we see and what we understand. We know enough to become interested, but not enough to satisfy that interest.

That’s where curiosity begins. And perhaps that’s a better way to think about marketing than promotion.

Not: How do we tell everyone about our film?

But: How do we make someone want to know more?

We explain too much

This is where I think film marketing often goes wrong.

A synopsis explains the story. The trailer explains the synopsis. The director’s statement explains what the story really means. Then a social media post explains why we should care about all of it.

By the time someone finally watches the film, we’ve spent weeks telling them what they’re supposed to see. But cinema works because audiences discover things for themselves.

Marketing should leave some of that pleasure intact.

A trailer doesn’t need to tell the entire story. A poster doesn’t need to contain every character. And a filmmaker doesn’t always need to explain what the audience should take away from the film.

Sometimes one extraordinary still tells me more about whether I want to see a film than a perfectly written synopsis ever could.

The challenge is deciding what not to say.

A poster and a trailer aren’t a strategy

When we talk about marketing a short film, we often start by making a list of materials.

We need a poster.
We need stills.
We need a trailer.
We need a press kit.

Of course we need those things. But they’re tools, not a strategy.

Before making them, there is a much more interesting question to answer: who might actually care about this film?

And the answer doesn’t have to be “people who watch short films.”

A film about architecture might find an audience among architects. A story about dance might connect with dancers. A film dealing with a particular social issue may already have communities discussing exactly the questions it raises.

Film marketing has a tendency to look inward. We talk to festivals, film journalists, distributors and other filmmakers because that’s the world we know.

But the natural audience for a film may exist somewhere completely different.

Once you start thinking that way, marketing becomes much less about broadcasting and much more about finding connections.

Don’t turn the film into a product

There is an uncomfortable side to all of this.

Most filmmakers didn’t start making films because they wanted to become marketers. And I don’t think every director should suddenly have to become a content creator, constantly documenting their life or finding clever ways to feed an algorithm.

Something is lost when every moment of making a film is immediately evaluated for its promotional potential. The work has to come first.

But I don’t think the alternative is to ignore marketing altogether.

There is a difference between turning a film into a product and thinking carefully about how you introduce it to people.

The same attention we give to choosing a title, a costume or a piece of music can be given to choosing the image that first represents the film. Or the sentence we use to describe it. Or what we decide not to reveal in a trailer. Those are creative choices too.

And when they’re good, they don’t sit outside the film.

They feel like part of it.

Give people a reason to care

Maybe that’s ultimately what marketing a short film should be. Not shouting louder. Not telling everyone how many awards you’ve won. Not explaining why the film is important.

Just finding the clearest and most honest way to invite someone in.

Because after spending years making a film, it’s understandable that we feel people should want to see it. But they haven’t spent those years with us.

They don’t know the characters yet. They haven’t heard the music. They don’t know the ending. They haven’t fallen in love with the things we have fallen in love with.

Nobody is waiting for your short film.

Somewhere out there, however, are people who might absolutely love it.

They just don’t know it exists yet.