| Cateory | Description |
| Action/Adventure | Big adventures, hero journeys, disaster, survival, daring stunts, and action sequences. |
| Amination | Far-out or surreal visual elements with objects that can into other things. These stories usually show us something real actors or sets cannot do as easily, such as talking animals or living toys. |
| Ensemble | Stories about groups of characters unified by a common theme. |
| Experimental | Avant-garde rule breakers. Creating films that audiences may not even understand. |
| Biography | Find meaning of the person's life (theme), and make the person the hero (or anit-hero) in his or her own tale. |
| Buddy | Friendship or nonromantic close relationshipos developed over a series of events. |
| City Symphony | Films about a single location with different perspectives, characters, events, and time frames. |
| Comedy | Shows how characters in the best situations still manage to mess up, or create 'fish out of water' tales. These stories are often use to showcase the brutality of social tale. |
| Crime | Murder mystery, detectives solving cases, reporters investigating crimes, prision stories, heists, spy stories, criminal/victims getting revenge, courtroom dramas, organized crime. |
| Disillusionment | Protagonist's view of life changes from positive to negative. |
| Documentary | True story about event, people, or place. |
| Drama | Passion, madness, dreams of human heart. |
| Education | Protagonist changes worldview from negative to positive by learning something new. |
| Fantasy | New-world rules playing with time, space, and laws of nature. |
| Historical | Stories from the past often work great to show us some themes of our present situations at comfortable distances. |
| Horror | Bad, evil, scary, creepy things. |
| Journey | Trip, road trip, or travel tale. |
| Love Story | What gets in the way of romantic love? |
| Maturation | Coming-of-age story. |
| Mockumentary | Fiction that looks like a real documentary. |
| Music Video | Short film for a song and hoepfully with some story, theme, or context. |
| Musical | Songs used to tell stories from any genre. |
| Myth | Hero jounreys, ancestral memories, prehistory, moral conduct, or urban legends. |
| Obsession/ Addition/ Temptation | Willpower versus obsessions/addictions/temptations. |
| Personal Anthology | Video diaries, personal events. |
| Postmodern | No single lead protagonist with distortion of time and space. |
| Punishment | Good protagonist turns bad and is punished. |
| Psycodrama | Madmen, seral killers, crazy people, nuthouses. |
| Reality Shows | Real-life voyeuristic-style stories. |
| Redemption | Protagonist goes from morally bad to good. |
| Science Fiction | Possible future, unknown past. |
| Societal Problems | Political, racial, medical, educational, business, environmental, family. |
| Sports | Big character change in relationship to sports. |
| Supernatural | Spiritual or freaky occurrence in unseen realms. |
| Tragedy | Cautionary tales, somber themes, catatrophic characters. |
| War | Combat, prowar/antiwar. |
| Western | Wild West. Good versus evil. Gun fights, cowboys, bank robberies, cattle drives, ranches, horses, saloons. |
| From textbook page 36 & 37. Developing Digital Short Films by Sherri Sheridan |
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