I'm pro-silent student film

I've watched student films and they're mostly awful. The better ones are silent, and the silent movies now tend to have voice-over narration rather than intertitles. I believe in a combination. When they rereleased the silent film Metropolis, color tinted with a rock soundtrack, it had a mix of subtitles and intertitles. Then there was Mike Kuchar's SIns of the Fleshapoids which had comic book-like dialog balloons along with voice-over narration. Guy Madden's first movie, "The Dead Father", was a voice-over with one scene where we hear one character say a line. He coughs and we hear it as if it were recorded on a record.

There was a Japanese silent film I saw made probably in the '80s in the style of an old silent movie. It had intertitles in Japanese that required subtitles in English, and it had the machines speak, like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The heroes are hired to deliver a ransom---the people who hire them come in with a tape recorder---they turn it on and we hear a voice explain the job. Later, we hear the villain speak to them through a loud speaker.

There was Robert Rodriguez's student film "Bedhead". It won awards in film festivals across the country. THAT was his ticket to Hollywood, not El Mariachi. When he met with studio executives, they asked him if he had any ideas for a feature film he wanted to make. He said maybe a real version of the movie he just made. He showed them El Mariachi and they thought it was good enough to release theatrically.

A silent movies tend to require music. I've heard it argued that there are no public domain sound recordings in the United States while others think recordings made before 1970 are public domain, at least if the composition isn't copyrighted. There's Soviet music. The USSR wasn't part of the international copyright convention. Ethiopian music. I don't know.

There used to be a website attacking bad student films, listing student film cliches, such as slow-talking actors, smoking cigarettes to show how upset they are, and various artistic touches. There was an angry comment on the site from a film student who had maxed out his credit cards making a short silent film for $40,000. He correctly recognized that dialog was where student films fell flat. His film was about a girl preparing to leave home and it apparently had no soundtrack at all. He submitted it to film festivals and was infuriated when they would send it back with a note saying it had no sound. 

That was in the days before digital video. He apparently shot on 16mm. But----forty thousand dollars? For a movie about a girl preparing to leave home? For forty thousand dollars he couldn't add music? Back then you could buy four new cars for that. 

Then there were comments from film students who thought it would be HILARIOUS to make a student film using every one of the student film chiches listed. And, last time I looked for student films on YouTube, half of them seemed to be student films that were spoofs of bad student films. That became a genre itself, and not a very good one.

But---poor film students. They spend four years studying FEATURE films, then, for their final project, they get to make a SHORT film. They're two very different things. You don't even need a good idea to make a feature film. If you have an original idea, you're trying too hard. A short film requires far more thought if it's going to be any good.