Short films
-
Watch: Short Film Series Twentieth Century Faux, by Jake and Will
With a sea of short films washing up on the shores of YouTube and Vimeo each day, how can filmmakers make their work stand out? One team with a solution is Jake & Will — Will Blank and Jake Bradbury — for whom their 16-episode online short film series Twentieth Century Faux is both a smartly packaged exploration of millennial anxieties as well as a kind of personal filmmaking challenge that connects these two filmmakers back to the essential pleasures of making movies. The shorts run from one to three minutes each, are released weekly, are titled after well-known movies, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2019 -
Be Everywhere All At Once: The Ultimate Guide to Festivals, Online, & Your Short Film Release
The following article is crossposted with, Short of the Week, a new kind of film festival aimed at discovering the next wave of emerging filmmakers crafting stories for online audiences. Visit them at shortoftheweek.com A few years ago we released our short film online and shared the tactics behind the strategy we used to get views and industry attention in one of our most popular articles titled How We Launched Our Film Online. In the years since, we’ve had the pleasure of working with thousands of filmmakers to release their short films to millions of people around the world and […]
by Andrew S. Allen on Jul 18, 2018 -
Watch: Laura Moss’s Fry Day
New York-based director and production designer Laura Moss landed on Filmmaker’s 25 New Face list this past year on the strength of Fry Day, her entirely exemplary short film about a teenage girl selling Polaroid photos on the eve of serial killer Ted Bundy’s execution. With this macabre event as a backdrop, Moss goes on to create, as I wrote in the profile, “a nail-bitingly tense, mournfully sad coming-of-age adventure.” I went on to write: That Fry Day uses the disquieting atmospherics and moral turbulence of the serial killer genre without indulging in gratuitous physical violence is a testament to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 30, 2018 -
Short Film Confessions Redux
Thirteen years ago, I wrote an article for Filmmaker: “Confessions of a Short Film Programmer.” In my introduction, I hinted at the most brutal clichés filmmakers should avoid (uncleared movie posters on the walls, a protagonist drinking from a Jack Daniel’s bottle, revealing a character to be a mime), but I didn’t want to completely wallow in the negative. After all, as a programmer of short films at Sundance, I’m fortunate to have such a cool job, even if it also happens to be the only job I’m capable of doing professionally. Since the publication of that article, the world […]
by Mike Plante on Mar 8, 2018 -
Watch: Christopher Arcella’s Bitcoin-Inspired Short, The Satoshi Sculpture Garden
With bitcoin values soaring and “blockchain” the soon-to-be-new film industry buzzword, Christopher Arcella is out with a well-timed short, The Satoshi Sculpture Garden. With a cool, meditative calm, he follows a young woman as she surveys an outdoor sculpture garden consisting of pieces that play upon ideas tied to the cryptocurrency. Data visualization indeed! From Arcella’s director’s statement: In order to fully appreciate Bitcoin one needs to have a basic understanding of Bitcoin’s technology and the systems that the technology is disrupting. Otherwise, trying to understand Bitcoin is a bit like trying to derive meaning from abstract sculpture. The Satoshi […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2017 -
Finding the Storyline in a Documentary Short (Or, Do Short Docs Need Narrative Arcs?)
When you announce to the world (or at least on social media) that you’re making a short documentary, you’re bound to be asked the obvious question: “What’s it about?” As any documentary filmmaker can tell you, there’s a short answer to that question and a long answer, depending upon who is asking and how much time they have to spare. In the case of my short documentary film in-progress, Sole Doctor, the short answer is, “It’s about George, an African-American shoe cobbler who has owned a business in Portland for over 50 years and is getting ready to retire and pass […]
by Paula Bernstein on Feb 9, 2017 -
Vimeo Introduces ‘Staff Pick’ Premieres as Year-Round Online Film Festival
Vimeo has announced it is extending its flagship Staff Pick channel into a year-long online film festival and has added new laurels honoring films selected as Best of the Month and Year, plus weekly premieres. “The Vimeo Staff Pick channel represents the most progressive and imaginative filmmaking direct from our community of world class filmmakers,” said Peter Gerard, General Manager, Vimeo. “The iconic Staff Pick laurel has helped launched the careers of many filmmakers coming up through the Vimeo platform and we’re excited to continue to honor and elevate our Staff Picked filmmakers with two new levels of prestige, while also […]
by Paula Bernstein on Oct 5, 2016 -
“Shorter is Better”: Sundance Programmer Mike Plante Offers Advice on Short Film Strategy at the Sundance NEXT Festival
A calling card to showcase proficiency and ambition, a vehicle to find resources for a larger project, or simply the most appropriate, or simply cost effective, way to tell a story, short films continue to be crucial for the development and discovery of emerging storytellers. The lack of access to more substantial budgets and the relative democratization of the medium via new technologies are major reasons why filmmakers continue to rely on short form narratives to fine-tune their craft at a lower risk. Today, festivals are receiving more and more short film submissions, making standing out from the pack increasingly […]
by Carlos Aguilar on Aug 23, 2016 -
“Going Beyond the Norm”: Theodore Collatos and Christopher Jason Bell on Making New Work, Going Beyond Hybrids and New Platforms
[Editor’s note: this conversation between filmmakers Christopher Jason Bell and Theodore Collatos is primarily about the making of their short films: Collatos’ Albatross and Time, and Bell‘s One Times One. You can watch Time at the bottom of this interview. We’ll be posting the online premieres of Albatross and One Times One over the next few days.] While I often disagree with who the majority of the micro-budget filmmakers taste-makers decide to anoint as One To Watch, I’ve found plenty of directors worth talking about in the few years I’ve been “in the game” (my debut feature The Winds That Scatter premiered last year). Theodore “Teddy” Collatos is one of those […]
by Christopher Jason Bell on May 24, 2016 -
Going Reverse Oedipal Outside the Margins: Eight Tribeca 2016 Short Films
The wide-ranging 15th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival feels more screen-agnostic than ever, with films, television, VR, and interactive projects expanding across two weeks of downtown-centric programming. While resisting the urge to identify an all-encompassing theme that sloppily groups all these works into a State of the Union address, the shorts I viewed provided an appropriately hefty sampling of independent cinema comfortably outside the margins. Famous faces, small budgets, issue-driven calls-to-action, oddball foreign comedies, intriguing student work, and throwbacks to pop cinema were all accounted for. Given the scope and depth of the films being offered then, take the following as […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 19, 2016
