This week, I finished yet another edit pass on Machination, our pandemic inspired horror / drama that follows the plight of a character named Maria suffering from mental illness in the face of a world pushing fear. It is running at 62 minutes, minus opening and closing credits.

When the first cut clocked in at only 60 minutes, we went back to the drawing board and wrote new scenes to be filmed. We called back the lead actor Steffi Thake and even recruited new actors to play additional characters, young versions of Maria and her brother Yorgen, which we meet in dreams and flashbacks in the story.

We had this idea in our head that we wanted the film to run for at least 70 minutes. For some reason, 70 minutes felt like a feature to us whereas anything under wasn’t quite there. But why did I feel this way? Wasn’t 70 minutes still on the short side? What is the length a film needs to run to quality as a feature film?