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  "path": "/the-singers-short",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-26T18:40:07.000Z",
  "site": "https://nofilmschool.com",
  "tags": [
    "Cinematography",
    "Directing advice",
    "Short film",
    "Short filmmaking",
    "Oscar shorts",
    "The singers",
    "Sam davis",
    "Directing",
    "The Singers just won an Oscar",
    "www.youtube.com",
    "the lines between fiction and documentary filmmaking are more porous than you'd think",
    "the importance of staying open to what a documentary reveals",
    "chiaroscuro",
    "NFS has you covered",
    "the psychology of framing",
    "what it takes to direct non-actors",
    "realism in film",
    "finding your filmmaking style"
  ],
  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nThe Singers just won an Oscar for live-action short film. It’s a huge accomplishment for a film that didn’t take the usual approach to many elements of its production.\n\nDirector and cinematographer Sam Davis set out to make the short with no script, no shot list, and a cast of non-actors he spent a year hunting down on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. The result is a warm, funny, deeply felt film about a sing-off in a dive bar, adapted from the 1852 short story by Russian author Ivan Turgenev.\n\nIt sounds like a recipe for chaos. Not every filmmaker is going to spend a year casting from social media or shoot a narrative short on 35mm without a script. But the underlying principles (cast for authenticity, light for character, let coverage carry the arc, leave room for the real thing) are available to anyone.\n\nDavis spoke with Mark Bone about his process. Here's what Davis' experience can teach you about your own filmmaking.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## Your Background Is Your Film School\n\nDavis comes from documentary filmmaking, and he didn't try to hide it when approaching fiction. Instead, he leaned into it and “the unknown.” He took the chance to merge two worlds he knew well.\n\n\"It was the opportunity that the idea presented to marry my documentary background with a work of fiction that really sparked for me,\" he said.\n\nAs we’ve covered before, the lines between fiction and documentary filmmaking are more porous than you'd think, and some of the most distinctive work comes from filmmakers who stop compartmentalizing and start building projects that use what they know from their backgrounds.\n\n## You Can Build a World, Not a Shot List\n\nDavis went in with almost no predetermined coverage in mind. There were a few detail shots and close-ups sketched out in advance, but everything else was reactive. The approach was intentional.\n\n\"This was going to be an exercise in leaning into the unknown and taking big risks and doing things in a really unconventional way,\" he said.\n\nObviously, please don’t show up to set unprepared. Davis knew his location, equipment, team, and talent. What he left open was the path through the world he'd built.\n\n“There were certain concepts like that that we knew we wanted to shoot in some way, but really kept it extremely open-ended when it came to the coverage and the script,” he said. With dialogue largely being improvised, the element of exploration was already built into the project.\n\nWe’ve written about the importance of staying open to what a documentary reveals rather than forcing a story into a predetermined shape, and Davis applied that instinct to fiction.\n\n## Light for Character\n\nThe visual approach to _The Singers_ drew from Renaissance-era paintings that have high contrast, warm skin tones, and faces carved from shadow in chiaroscuro. Davis and his gaffer discovered that bouncing hard light off the bar's laminate surface produced exactly that quality.\n\n\"The way that it glowed up into a face if we drove really hard light down into the bar was really beautiful,” he said.\n\nBy having all the characters at the bar, he revealed, they could cheat some footage and flip it in post to give it the 180-degree effect of a character reacting to another, even if on the day they were facing the same direction and being shot the same as every other character.\n\nHe added of the bounce, “It accentuated all the lines on these guys' faces in a really beautiful way. It really brought out the character of these faces.\"\n\nThey shot almost exclusively on tungsten lights, which deepened the film's nostalgic texture on 35mm. For a breakdown of how tungsten performs differently from LED, __NFS has you covered.\n\n_The Singers_ Credit: Netflix\n\n## Coverage Should Tell the Story Arc\n\nDavis made a deliberate structural choice in how he covered the bar: start tight, open up slowly. The framing was doing emotional work from the first shot.\n\n\"We wanted the coverage to start really tight, almost exclusively singles,” he said. “One, because we wanted to indulge in the faces, but two, because we wanted to isolate characters at the beginning of the film and then slowly start to expand to connect the characters over the course of the film as there is this sort of community and catharsis that emerges with the sing-off.\"\n\nOur breakdown of the psychology of framing gets into this, too. Davis used close-ups and wides deliberately to let the coverage mirror what was happening between the people in the room.\n\n## Cast Real People to Get Real Performances\n\nCasting non-actors is a risk, but there’s a reason filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson like to do it. You can get an authenticity from “real people” that actors sometimes just don’t have. Davis says the key is not to ask non-actors to pretend. Ask them to be themselves. You might be surprised by what they give you in their performances.\n\n“All the dialogue is improvised by the people who are playing themselves,” he said. “There’s stuff I could never have written.”\n\nScripted dialogue, he said, sets untrained performers up to fail.\n\n\"I ask someone, 'Hey, will you come and be in my film and do what you're doing right now? Be yourself,’” he said.\n\nHe wants to pretend as little as possible because realism is what he is after.\n\nWe’ve got a solid primer on what it takes to direct non-actors, including why their rawness can do things trained performers simply can't manufacture.\n\n## Find Something Real in Each Scene, Too\n\nThe emotional climax of _The Singers_ comes when bartender Mike Young sings to someone he lost. What audiences don't know is that Young had recently lost his wife in real life, and he agreed to dedicate the performance to her.\n\n\"Any time we could make the performances about more than just the lyrics of the song, we tried to do that. We wanted there to be depth there,\" Davis said. “And I think you really feel it at that sort of emotional climax with Mike finishing ‘Unchained Melody.’”\n\nDavis couldn't have written that. What he could do was create the conditions for it to surface.\n\nWhen you’re aiming for realism in film, the goal isn't to manufacture authenticity. Build an environment where the real thing feels safe enough to show up.\n\n## Be Sincere\n\nDavis admitted that after film school, he was afraid to be earnest in his storytelling, until _The Singers_ changed his mind about what filmmaking could be.\n\n\"I was afraid of being sincere. I thought it was really uncool,” he said. He added later, “A friend of mine who's a producer and saw the film at a screening, she said that sincerity is the last great form of punk rock.”\n\nHe stopped treating crowd-pleasing as a lesser ambition. If you’re working on finding your filmmaking style, stop trying to be someone else's kind of filmmaker. If your work is pulling toward warmth and humor, that’s okay.\n\n_The Singers_ is currently streaming on Netflix.",
  "title": "How to Make a Short with No Script, No Shot List, No Actors"
}