Last few years I helped out a lot of student films and also went to film screenings which included student films and noticed a lot of similarities or cliches. To be honest I also suffered from these cliches before, until I saw so many student films including the same things and learned to avoid these cliches and it improved the short films I was working on by removing these cliche scenes.
Waking up in bed
Many student films open with someone or two people waking up in the bed, however it has become such a cliche opening or scene that it is better to avoid than to include. As most of them don’t have a meaning with the shot or scene, then having an easy opening. Because most of them you can literally cut away the waking up scene and just start the film at a later point, as most of the time the waking up opening isn’t important enough to include.
Bathroom Mirror
After waking up of course you would wash your face and look into a mirror, but this also is a cliche scene. More often they say it’s about the character reflecting on themselves, however more often it’s not well used. Especially when it’s at the start of the film, we don’t know what the character is reflecting about. Also because the bathroom mirror scene is over used so much it has become a major cliche. If you want to show someone reflecting on themselves there are more reflective surfaces you can do this with instead of with the bathroom mirror.
Breakfast
To finish off the trinity of opening cliches, we have the breakfast scene. This is often just more of a filler scene, because they already have them waking up and going to the bathroom and finishing it off having breakfast. More often these 3 are a cliche opening combo and more often copying standard openings of a lot of vloggers who often have this cliche combo. But more often these can be deleted as the real story starts after these 3 scenes with the character leaving his home. Even if there is a monologue or dialogue, more often these can also happen somewhere else with more meaning and reason.
Dream / hallucination films
There are a lot of dreams or hallucination movies, where the main character is sleeping, meditating, hypnotized, passed out or under influence of drugs and has a montage of different shots and often showing past, present and future or 5 stages of grief, but instead of a short dream sequence the majority of the film is a dream or hallucination and the film end up with them waking up changed. Though the students think they are being creative and new because they haven’t seen a lot of these movies, the reality is there are a lot of these films made by students and become quite cliche. Also more often written by cinematography students and it includes a lot of interesting looking shots without needing a coherent story, so they have a lot of good looking shots to fill their showreel. As there are a lot of difficult cliche shots like underwater shots or black or white infinity studio shots and more. Biggest problem is with these films there is no coherent story and is just a cinematography showreel.
Psycho because they are psycho
There also seem to be a lot of psychological movies, but the major problem with a lot of them, they don’t explain why the person is psychotic. Their excuse is that they are psycho because they are psycho. Often also have cliche scenes of the character randomly murder someone out of nowhere. As if they only watched Psycho partially and missed the point, Norman Bates became psychotic because of how Norman was treated by his mother. As the story is always stronger when there is a reason for certain actions. Someone being psychotic or crazy with no reason often is a weaker story then when you know where the actions are coming from.
Out of the closet story
A lot of students are targeting queer film festivals as recently there are a lot of them and also a lot of them are free or have a low entry fee. However there seem to be a lot of cliche out of the closet stories, with the main character telling their family or loved ones, with either a positive or negative response. However many of them are basically the same story, just with a different culture, ethnicity or location. While there are plenty of other queer stories to explore as the coming out of closet stories has become a cliche and also predictable. Because they often want to do a twist result, so when the parents are portrayed as very anti queer the twist be: they are ok with it, but vice versa, when hinted they are pro queer, the twist they are anti. It’s better to think beyond this as there are other queer stories or struggles that aren’t as well known to tell about.
Filmmaker Fans
Students copying the style of a certain filmmaker, may it be Tarantino, Wes Anderson or other. More often because the student is such a fan of the filmmakers style, but is blindsided that it does not match the story or genre of their short film. Yet also not understand the filmmaker style enough to understand why they choose to film in a particular way and which genre that works well with. I have worked on a thriller film messed up by a student editor who is a Tarantino fan and changed what was supposed to be an easy thriller film and shot in a thriller style. But he edited with western music and became an off western parody and lost all the thriller elements using the because of the western music. Also too many Wes Anderson fans who filmed everything looking boringly flat, while they don’t understand that Wes Anderson films make use of a lot of set decorations and color pallets to make his image look interesting and not just film as symmetrically as possible, but his style also doesn’t fit all genres of films.
Comment below what other student film cliches you think student filmmakers should be aware of?
