4 ways to make your film more engaging

Do you think a simple low budget film can run for about 40 minutes and still not bore the audience?

Can it keep us hooked till the very end?

Soup heroes proved to us that it indeed can! It didn’t feel like 40 minutes had passed when I was still clutching my stomach, laughing when the credits came on.

Here are a few insights from Rishi Karthik, director of Soup Heroes on what goes down well with the audience and what does not.

USING HOMEGROWN HUMOUR

As we all know, comedy is ironically the most difficult genre of film- in both writing and enacting. Not surprisingly, it is laced with booby traps that most filmmakers today get caught in.

Way back in history, comedy involved dramatic or comical enactments of everyday events. But over the time, it has evolved into something that relies hugely on realism. Soup heroes does a fantastic job of keeping it real by using lines that would make us laugh in real life. Keeping an eye out for all things that make him laugh in the monotony of life is what Rishi does and it’s least to say that it has worked in his favour, because not once during the short does any dialogue or scene feel staged.

The predictable pattern of comedy from popular comedians is the one of the most imminent reasons for their comedy increasingly falling flat. Buy short films offer the added advantage of introducing debutante actors, who’s style the audience are not familiar with.

KEEPING THE OBJECTIVE IN MIND

The objective of the film is its lifeline, because without it the film would be dead.

It is a common problem that we start to write a story and end up with something else altogether, perhaps because we put too much thought into it.

In the process of improvisation, we often lose the core idea behind the story. When asked on how he deals with such infidelities of the mind, Rishi says that he does not put too much thought into it and writes what he feels at the moment and that his desired output always ensues.

MAKING IT RELATABLE

Let’s be honest, most short films are no budget are low budget, that’s why they’re short films. So it is impossible that we try to make an Interstellar in the given time and money. It is equally hard to make short for the audience as a whole, so it is always wise to target our films at a particular group in the audience, in order to send out your message loud and clear.

Everything from the language, dialect, slang, and body language of the cast will depend on the target audience. Soup heroes, for example is a short on incognito using, swearing youngsters whose primary concern in life is to get a girl, so it clearly is aimed at a niche audience who can relate with it.

SCOPE FOR BUILDING THE STORY

Every story has the scope to be further expounded on.

With Soup Heroes, what started out as just one story, turned out to be the foundation for the upcoming web-series. How, you ask?

Character Detailing.

Soup Heroes relies entirely on its characters. In an extremely rare case, the next instalment- Duke David as prelude to the movie is going to be out! And it’s rare because Duke David is a movie dedicated solely to the antagonists of the series to come.

When the audience begin to anticipate the things that are to come, you know you’ve done your job right!