The first short I'll be looking at is Sun - it was shortlisted this year (you can watch it here) and won, alongside 3 other entries. It stood out for me in particular due to its gorgeous art style (I'm quite fond of animation myself) and its easy-to-follow plot and characters.
Character-wise we have two main driving forces in this short - the sun and the man. It's arguable which is the protagonist and which is the antagonist, as the sun has more screen time but appears to antagonize the man. To help us understand who occupies which role we can take a closer look at the plot structure.
For instance, it starts out in equilibrium - namely the world is going about its normal business when the sun shows up and begins burning things. Therefore we can say that the sun itself is the agent of change in this plotline - the main factor that points the characters in the story all in the same direction. After this conflict or enigma comes along, we have the meat of the story, otherwise known as the path to resolution. This involves our protagonist - who, in this model, we can safely say is the man - providing an equal and opposite reaction to the enigma and creating a new, convergent direction for the plotline.
To wrap things up, to tie up loose ends, we have our closure - our reinstatement of equilibrium. The equilibrium in this short is the night-time, so it would make sense that to reinstate such an equilibrium one would have to bring the night back. And that's exactly what the man does. With nightfall comes the reinstatement of the equilibrium, and the end of the plotline. We have a completely self-contained narrative structure, all within the competition's confines of 90 seconds. 
Not a huge amount can be said about editing, as the short is entirely one shot (simply because it's an animation doesn't necessarily mean that editing isn't involved, it just so happens that this short is entirely one 'take'), unless one wanted to discuss trivialities like the visual displacement filter used to give the impression of heatwaves (like shown to the right). However, in the sense of identification, we as the viewer can further relate ourselves to the man in this situation as (since we have a much more real sense of heat) we can easily put ourselves in his position. The director of this short (one Paul Hill) really doesn't give the viewer a lot to go on as far as identification is concerned otherwise: he's a stick man with no discernible features and no backstory or bio, so why should we care about him? 
Well, within context, he's the most relatable character in the short on a biological level - the only other characters aside from the sun are a few cows and a couple of trees. Naturally, we as humans would root for the home team unless given reason to do otherwise, and this is no exception. Even without a backstory, the situation he's in leads us to identify with him. Here he is, just walking by, doing nothing in particular, when suddenly his life is in danger and he has to save himself. That could happen to anyone, mathematically speaking. His size helps the viewer feel compassionate towards him: he's tiny, and pretty much dwarfed compared to the sun. This kickstarts people's natural mothering instincts, which is also why we find small things cute.
This conveniently leads us to the short's usage of suspense. Throughout the sun/man's conflict, there is, however subtle, and air of uncertainty to what's going on. Will the man survive? Will he be burned to a crisp like those trees? We don't know. The suspense systematically increases until the apex of the piece: the sun has lost its patience and is chasing the man, all guns blazing (if one will excuse the pun). Things don't look good for the man. Surely he won't survive this? Surprise! He does. It's this sort of rollercoaster of positive and negative emotions that constructs an effective use of suspense. Now, I've been very vague about this suspense thus far - How exactly is Hill conveying this suspense? There's no editing, so that can't be sped up. This doesn't leave much else, apart from the music. The music in this short is extremely effective, holding our hand on this rollercoaster and pointing towards how we should be feeling at any given point in time. It speeds up when we should be feeling tense, and calms down in moments of reprieve.
2. Screen Kiss
The next, and final, short (watch it here) is very much different. It is a documentary, depicting real life events and presenting them in an easy to understand and visually appealing format. However, a staple of documentary is that it may not necessarily follow a strict narrative structure - or, at least, not the 'Classic Realist' variation. More times than not this is because the director has more limiting material to deal with: he doesn't have the ability to 'just change this one thing' or construct exactly what is going to happen when - he is documenting real life events. Because of this, it becomes far more difficult to produce tension or suspense in a documentary short - especially one with such a light-hearted nature. Granted, there are documentaries out there that use suspense (last year's The Imposter, for example), but even that had drama sequences or reconstructions, and it certainly wasn't kept to 90 seconds.
All this means that the focus must change when creating a compelling documentary - How do you accurately tell a real story that also keeps people interested? Life isn't too interesting most of the time. Gingerly pointing a camcorder at whatever's happening on set and hoping for the best isn't going to work, either (A couple of 90's films did this, an example that springs to mind is Plunkett & Macleane (Jake Scott, 1999)). So what's the answer?
Editing and sound! Documentary directors put a lot of effort into crafting a smooth and flowing experience for the viewer - arguably more so than regular films. They interchange interview audio with video from the interview and other candid video (like the screenshot above) so that the audience is always interested.
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