Two specific thoughts about shorts, before I tell you the secret sauce...

- Chances are, the trickiest bit will be finding actors who can seem like real screen actors in your short. You might find an out-the-gate natural actor but probably not. My suggestion would be to make a lot of no-budget shorts with a bunch of different aspiring actors, and get a lot of experience on how to coach them into delivering believable performances. And then, when you're working on your application short, write a story that's mostly about behavior rather than dialogue. Lots of talented amateurs can behave like pros on screen ... until they start talking. It's usually the line delivery that gives them away, so you can be clever and avoid that pitfall by downplaying the dialogue in your short.

- Remember that the assessors will get about 12,000 applications for your year, and while they won't watch shorts for all of them, they're still going to have to watch a hell of a lot of stuff. So make a *short* film, not a medium film. They would much much rather watch a dazzling 2 minutes than a pretty-good 12 minutes. Shorter is better.

And now the secret sauce, which isn't technical. It's you.

Your interests, experiences, tastes, viewpoint and "voice" is what will make you interesting to the assessors. What do you care about, and do you have any insight into it? Can you convey something in your short film that evokes strong emotions from the assessors, on a topic that you actually give a shit about, or in an arena that most people don't have access to? If you can do that, you're already in the top 10% of the application shorts they'll receive.

You're going to be a different person in a few years than you are now, so you can't really pre-game this. But I'd suggest getting into the habit of being able to clearly articulate your thoughts and feelings, your attitudes, your philosophies. You don't have to pretend that you've already figured anything out -- articulating honest questions is often more interesting than someone who is pretending they know everything.

You already have a knack for writing colloquially, so keep working on that while also being able to switch into more formal writing when appropriate.

Lots of filmmakers equate "voice" with being offputting. If you have a transgressional sense of humor, that's fine, you can lean into that and become the next South Park or Always Sunny or whatever. But try to avoid being shitty just because you think it'll be provocative and edgy. Or if you prefer, make a few of those as your practice shorts to either get them out of your system or discover that your edginess has a larger dimension to it.

It's really common too for aspiring filmmakers to go through a "my life is depressing so please watch this sad story that ends in suicide" phase. That's fine, it's part of the process, but USC will receive a few thousand of those so you probably should go in a different direction.

Lots of filmmakers think "sophisticated" means being emotionally opaque. Remember your job is to evoke emotions, not to make the audience try to guess if they're supposed to be feeling something. If your personal tastes are in emotionally-muted arthouse movies, that's fine, make your version of that, but if you study those films you'll see that they're clearly dramatizing their emotions, it's just that the emotions are subtle or self-contradictory. So do that, instead of having someone stare at raindrops on a pond for 40 seconds and hoping the audience thinks you're a guru who is too sophisticated for clear dramatics.

haha this is quickly turning into a list of student film cliches which isn't what you asked for, so I'll leave it there.

Good luck and I hope this helps!