4 Mistakes That Broke This Short Film

When I was a kid, I made a bunch of silly sketch videos with my cousins. I would never want to go back and try to talk about those videos critically because I know they’re bad. And I think most filmmakers would feel the same about things like their student work, which often gets buried in our memories somewhere.

But Avery Dohrmann put his work under a microscope in a recent video. Most filmmakers would sooner delete the file. Instead, he posted it publicly and walked through exactly what went wrong.

The full autopsy of his college senior short catalogues every mistake so other filmmakers don't make the same ones.

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Every Shot Needs a Reason to Exist

Dohrmann acknowledges that one of his first sins is building a film around shots he just thought looked cool, with no connection to story or character. It’s a lot of unmotivated movement. The shots aren’t all bad, but they don’t really happen in conjunction with story beats.

The result was visual noise that felt technically ambitious but emotionally empty.

As you’re shot-planning, the question shouldn’t be, "Does this look good?" It's, "Why does this shot exist in this story? What does it communicate on a deeper level?" A well-composed shot can do a lot of heavy lifting. =It can establish character through body language, communicate power dynamics through framing, or externalize internal emotional states through lighting and lens choice. But only if you've thought about tone and visual language early in pre-production.

Purposeless visual choices add up to a film that feels a little incoherent. And if you’re doing too many “cool shots,” there’s no room to breathe. Think about your visual language and purposeful cinematography.

And this isn’t to say you can’t have any cool shots. Just make sure you have filmmaking fundamentals learned before you let your ambition run away with you.

Tonal Whiplash Kills Emotional Stakes

Dohrmann's second problem is that his serious moments kept getting undercut by jokes. Characters are feeling one thing, saying another.

This is likely a recent cinematic influence (I’d blame the glibness of some Marvel projects), but also betrays a lack of writing experience. Often, when this tactic is used, all the characters have a similar voice and react to drama in the same way.

If you’re deflating your drama before it can land, it signals that the filmmakers don't trust their own material. So viewers disengage.

Again, we’re not saying don’t have humor in dark material. Humor is important and has its place. This is about tonal intention versus tonal accident.

Some tonal shifts are earned. For example, Life Is Beautiful is a comedy set during the Holocaust, and it works because the tone stays internally consistent. The difference is intentionality. You don’t want jokes that undercut the stakes.

Read every scene aloud. Does the comedy earn its place? Or do you feel like a joke takes all the air out of an interaction in a way that’s tonally wrong? Maybe try again.

Start by thinking about each unique character. Get into that character’s head and consider how that unique person would respond in their voice. You might get more diverse results.

"If This, Then This" Is Not a Story

Dohrmann's third problem was that events happened, but the characters weren’t really driving the action, and the story beats weren’t naturally connected. He had a series of disconnected events.

In this short, plot beats happened only because the writer needed something to happen next, not because there was any real connective tissue between those beats. It’s a common mistake for beginning writers.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame have a simple test for this. Every scene transition in a well-structured story should connect with "therefore" or "but," never "and then."

The hero is late for work, therefore he speeds, but a cop pulls him over—therefore he'll miss the big meeting but the cop is his estranged father.

Each beat creates the conditions for the next one. Dohrmann's plot summary is a pure "and then" chain. Teens go to the desert, and then there's a spaceship, and then there are cannibal cultists, and then they escape. Nothing causes anything.

Causality is what builds investment. Audiences stop caring when they keep asking "Why?" and never get an answer.

Can you identify your second-act break and your climax? If the whole film just feels like rising action, it needs a rewrite.

Your Protagonist Has to Drive the Ending

Dohrmann also made a mistake with his characters. The person introduced as the protagonist had no decisive role in the climax. A different character drove the resolution. It wasn’t a case of a two-hander but a lack of focus and an underdeveloped main character.

There are times when you can subvert expectations with a protagonist, but it has to feel intentional. I’m thinking of examples like Psycho , which kills off its protagonist in a midpoint twist, or The Place Beyond the Pines , which has a similar narrative shift.

You don’t want a passive protagonist. You want a character to be striving for something, and you want to pay off their struggles with emotional, physical, or philosophical catharsis.

Also, remember that your main character’s journey is what should hook the audience. The character doesn’t always have to change, but the audience should be able to map their obstacles and the emotional journey as they face them.

Map your protagonist's arc against your plot structure. If someone else is making the active choices at the climax, that's a script-level problem.

At the outline phase, you should be able to describe each scene as “protagonist + action.” What are they doing (actively, not passively/reactively)? These actions should also ideally tie into your central theme, but that’s a lesson for another day.

And before you lock your script, do a simple pass going through and asking what decision your protagonist makes in each one. If the answer keeps coming up "none," you have a structural problem.

For more lessons from weak short films, check out Why Everyone Hates Your Short.