Fixing Common Short Film Mistakes

What are the key mistakes short films make in their stories?  How can these be fixed?

    The key mistakes that some short films make in their stories are no philosophical conflict, no narrative structure, heavy exposition (no story or story only being told, not shown), and using montages poorly. Having no philosophical conflict makes the story feel unmotivated as the philosophical conflict is the foundation of storytelling. To fix this, you must go back to writing and build a viewpoint vs. viewpoint conflict that sets up the base of your story and apply beliefs to your characters. Another mistake made is the lack of a narrative structure, namely a lack of character wants and costs in the story, which are needed to maintain the momentum of the story. Giving your characters wants is crucial and making that want have a large cost to the character creates a compelling story. One of the biggest mistakes which are made that manifest in a variety of ways is the use of heavy, often excessive and unnecessary, exposition, which creates a less engaging and boring story. This could be in the form of the story being 90% exposition, meaning that there really is no actual story, and to fix this you should use a story structure to help the story be engaging. Another way that it occurs is when the story happens off screen and the characters simply say what happened. To solve this issue, you should follow the rule of "show, don't tell" so that the audience is actually engaged by the story and not just listening to characters talk. And one more method that leads to the overuse of exposition is the use of montages. Often times, montages are only used to quickly dump a ton of exposition or show unnecessary information which bogs the story down. When starting off, avoid using montages and instead focus on writing a good story within the time frame.