Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas all began their careers making a short film. By contrasting and comparing the differences and similarities between feature films and short films, "Writing Short Films, 2nd Edition", offers readers the essential requirements necessary to make their writing crisp, sharp and compelling. Emphasising characters, structure, dialogue and story, Linda Cowgill dispels the 'magic formula' concept that screenplays can be constructed by anyone with a word processor and a script formatting program. This new edition has been completely updated and revised along with the addition of several new chapters and new film examples. Currently, this title remains the best selling university text book on writing short film screenplays.