F E S T I VA L E D U C AT I V O D E C I N E C I N E D F E S T

Short guide in English

This school year we are going to participate in the educational lm festival, CINEDFEST, which is
now in its 9th edition and which consists of a lm festival for schools, where pupils can design,
write, produce, shoot and edit a short ction or documentary lm with a maximum duration of
seven minutes.

A short lm is an audiovisual piece that can be recorded with whatever resources you have,
whether it is a video camera, a photo camera or a mobile phone. We can work in two di erent
ways:

a. Fiction, which means a story invented by yourselves with ctional characters as the main
characters as well as the story itself. There may also be the option that this story is based
on real events of some interest and, in that case, you can modify it as you wish or, on the
other hand, tell the story as we know it happened, changing or not the names and
surnames of the real protagonists.

b. A documentary, that is an in-depth investigative report, with a clear view of the director,
about real events and characters.

For example, a short ction lm could tell the story of a boy who goes on an outing with his
friends and during that morning everything turns into a nightmare when they meet a very strange
person on their way.

A short documentary lm would be, for example, to investigate the father of a colleague who has
been a great worker all his life in the construction sector but who keeps a secret, his passion for
cinema, which led him to participate in many lm sets in Tenerife as an extra and to be on the
same lm sets with great stars.

In CINEDFEST, ction short lms must be written, directed, performed and edited by the
students, if the short lm has adult characters, we recommend involving teachers and sta from
the school itself as actors and actresses, and even a family member, if necessary. As for
documentary short lms, we follow the same guidelines, but the main characters can be people
from outside the school. As for the primary and children's short lms, the teacher can take on
more roles, such as lming, editing, etc.

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 F E S T I VA L E D U C AT I V O D E C I N E C I N E D F E S T
You can work on the short lm in di erent ways, usually in a team with your classmates. The
lming can take place in the school or after school with your classmates. You can also carry out
this activity on your own if you wish, and work, for example, on 2D/3D animation or frame by
frame. There is an animation mode that recognises it.

There are several steps in the production of an audiovisual product that can be applied to both
modalities and that you can consult in the didactic section of the festival's website at
cinedfest.com. All you have to do is ask your teacher for the access codes in order to consult the
didactic guides and video tutorials carried out by professionals.

The steps are the following:

1. The idea.

That's the most important thing without an idea there is no lm. You must have something to tell
and usually a concept to communicate. For example, an idea could be, two teenage physics
enthusiasts discover a way to travel through time, but the experiment gets out of hand and one of
them can't get back to the present ever again. This would be the story, but what would be the
theme or concept? Well, the theme is limitless ambition. And the genre? Well, it's a science ction
story, because it's something that can happen in the future. If you look at it, you can experiment
with di erent genres such as drama, comedy, fantasy, adventure, horror, police, social and so on.

2. The script.

Once you have a clear idea of the story and concept as well as the genre, you can start writing.
We recommend that you start with a short story description of everything that will happen in the
narrative, something like a short story. Once you are clear about what happens, you can start
adding the characters dialogues as well as the OFF voice-overs (this means that we hear the
voices or sounds but we don't see the source they come from) that are in the OUT OF FIELD (the
space that the camera doesn't see but we know is there). The description of what happens plus
the dialogues make up the script.

3. Pre-production.

We get down to work to prepare the shooting, and for this we must take into account several
essential things like casting to see which people will play the characters in a more accurate way,
locate the spaces where the scenes will take place and plan the script from a technical point of
view, which is nothing more than the literary script in shots. It is necessary to prepare a detailed
list of costume needs, props, technique, make-up e ects, etc. and a recording plan with
schedules to know which days and at what times we will record.

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4. Filming.

Shooting is the most important step, where there is no turning back and where we have to adapt
to unexpected circumstances. For example, if we have planned a scene that takes place during
the day with bright sunshine and suddenly the sky becomes cloudy or even drizzly, we can adapt
the scene for this weather change or decide to shoot it in an improvised indoor location. Likewise,
the whole team has to be one hundred percent focused and coordinated so that everything goes
smoothly and the shooting plan can be respected in terms of the set times.

5. Post-production.

Once we have all the footage we need, comes the most rewarding moment of the whole process,
putting the shots together to bring the story to life. With simple video editing software such as
ShotCut or Imovie as well as more complex ones such as Adobe Premier or Final Cut pro X you
can bring your little lm to life, adding original or library music, texturing the image, matching
audio levels and adding titles.

The short lm can be shot in any language, but if it is not shot in Spanish, it must be subtitled in
Spanish.

Once you have nished, export the le and you can send it, through your teacher to the
cinedfest.com portal so that everyone can enjoy the work you have done and be a candidate in
the nal phase of the competition, whose awards ceremony will take place at the Multicines
Tenerife.

We hope that this quick guide has helped you to understand what steps you and your colleagues
need to take in order to make a successful short lm.

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