Short scripts - how much?

Outside of winning contests and gaining credits, there is no money in shorts. How many shorts have you ever bought? Exactly.

They are a good thing for festivals but not much else. They help build up your credits and give others a taste of what you and the producer can do.

This helps land bigger gigs. Some producers pay for shorts but its usually only a couple hundred dollars, merely because there is no money in shorts. They are buying the rights to it as a curtesy.

I have never heard of anyone who made anything significant from a short unless it did fantastic at a film festival and recieved the funding to be adapted into a feature.

Hope this helps.

Channel 4 over here in the UK ran a thing recently called Coming Up which advertised for 30 min scripts that could be produced into short films. If selected, the writer would receive £3000 (five and a half thousand dollars approx.) This has absolutely no bearing on how much you'd get elsewhere for similar material and is no indication of typical going rates. I think the money involved in things like this will vary wildly but saying that I don't think there's much demand for shorts anyway.

A friend of mine has now made 4 shorts. The first 3 were about 10 to 15 mins in duration, the last was 30 mins. He directed all 4, made very little in a financial sense, nor did he expect to. He always looked at it as his route into the mainstream of the business, to bigger and better things. His last short won awards, was nominated for others, and he's now written and is about to direct his first feature.

Holding out for the going rate (and there isn't really one) for a short can be a deal-breaker. The budget can very rarely sustain paying the writer anything but a token sum. Directors also often waive fees on such projects. It's about recognition, getting one's work out there in the hope that it leads to a sustainable career.