Short film

A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of not more than 40 minutes including all credits". Other film organizations may use different definitions, however; the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, for example, currently defines a short film as 45 minutes or less in the case of documentaries, and 59 minutes or less in the case of scripted narrative films.

In the United States, short films were generally termed short subjects from the 1920s into the 1970s when confined to two 35 mm reels or less, and featurettes for a film of three or four reels. "Short" was an abbreviation for either term.

The increasingly rare industry term "short subject" carries more of an assumption that the film is shown as part of a presentation along with a feature film. Short films are often screened at local, national, or international film festivals and made by independent filmmakers with either a low budget or no budget at all. They are usually funded by one or more film grants, nonprofit organizations, sponsors, or personal funds. Short films are generally used for industry experience and as a platform to showcase talent to secure funding for future projects from private investors, a production company, or film studios. They can also be released with feature films, and can also be included as bonus features on some home video releases.

All films in the beginning of cinema were very short, sometimes running only a minute or less. It was not until the 1910s when films started to get longer than about ten minutes. The first set of films were presented in 1894 and it was through Thomas Edison's device called a kinetoscope. It was made for individual viewing only. Comedy short films were produced in large numbers compared to lengthy features such as D. W. Griffith's 1915 The Birth of a Nation.^{[citation needed]} By the 1920s, a ticket purchased a varied program including a feature and several supporting works from categories such as second feature, short comedy, 4–10 minute cartoon, travelogue, and newsreel.

Short comedies were especially common, and typically came in a serial or series (such as the Our Gang movies, or the many outings of Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character).

Animated cartoons came principally as short subjects. Virtually all major film production companies had units assigned to develop and produce shorts, and many companies, especially in the silent and very early sound era, produced mostly or only short subjects.

In the 1930s, the distribution system changed in many countries, owing to the Great Depression. Instead of the cinema owner assembling a program of their own choice, the studios sold a package centered on a main and supporting feature, a cartoon and little else. With the rise of the double feature, two-reel shorts went into decline as a commercial category.

The year 1938 proved to be a turning point in the history of film comedies. Hal Roach, for example, had discontinued all short-subject production except Our Gang, which he finally sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1938. The Vitaphone studio, owned by Warner Bros., discontinued its own line of two-reel comedies in 1938; Educational Pictures did as much that same year, owing to its president Earle W. Hammons unsuccessfully entering the feature-film field. With these major comedy producers out of the running, Columbia Pictures actually expanded its own operations and launched a second two-reel-comedy unit in 1938. Columbia and RKO Radio Pictures kept making two-reel comedies into the 1950s.