Short films
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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 -
Short of the Week Selects Best Short Films of 2015
Earlier this year, Scott Macaulay interviewed Short of the Week founders Andrew S. Allen and Jason Sondhi about the site’s relaunch. Macaulay noted at the time that they “have done a top-to-bottom redesign — a clean look that also makes both searching and streaming easier. Indeed, the new Short of the Week acknowledges that a viewer today is as likely to watch a short on a large phone or streamed through a device like Chromecast to a television as on a laptop window.” Now, as the year comes to a close, the Short of the Week team reflects on the […]
by Paula Bernstein on Dec 15, 2015 -
Streaming for Dollars
Since the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, filmmakers have rolled the dice, releasing their shorts online for free in the hopes that their work will court the right set of eyeballs. Nowadays, even at banner institutions like The New York Times and The New Yorker, more and more curated short-form distribution opportunities are cropping up online that hint toward visibility and prestige for the films, along with, sometimes, financial returns for the filmmakers. Last December, The New Yorker introduced “The Screening Room,” a streaming platform where they rolled out three shorts acquired at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival: Person to […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 23, 2015 -
Cinematographer Catherine Lutes on Shooting the Pop-Up Porno Series
An unlikely combination of elements — the children’s pop-up book and X-rated adult relationship stories — collide in one of the more unusual series of shorts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: Pop-Up Porno. Toronto-based director Stephen Dunn was inspired by friends’ tales of online dating, and he worked with various graphic designers to come up with actual book illustrations. The resulting three films premiered in Park City, where the books were also exhibited. Bringing the turning pages to life is cinematographer Catherine Lutes, who below talks about the Canon C300, realizing the film on a tiny budget and accenting […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 13, 2015 -
Producing Shorts into Features: Three Producers and Their Films at Sundance
Curious about the physical process of turning a short into a feature, Filmmaker magazine interviewed the producers of three separate films about their experiences. Each film was originally a short that previously premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now a feature making its World Premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section. Last year director Damien Chazelle’s short won the Jury Prize at Sundance. This year, his feature of the same name, Whiplash, is the festival’s Opening Night feature. Transformed from an intense 15-minute short into a 105-minute full-length film, Whiplash maintained the same producing team but had to […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 16, 2014 -
Short Takes: The Role of The Short in Modern Filmmaking
Why make a short film? At Short Takes, a recent panel discussion co-presented by IFP and DCTV, the answers varied with each pass of the microphone. The participating panelists — Terence Nance, Dustin Guy Defa, Lauren Wolkstein, Ryan Koo, and Jeremiah Zagar — reflected upon prior efforts to offer a unique, holistic picture into the business and practice of short filmmaking. Koo, who recently revealed Amateur, a short prequel to his debut feature Manchild, said that he viewed the format as a calling card, a means to entice both the industry and a larger audience. Nance and Wolkstein, on the […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 25, 2013 -
Which Film Festivals Accept Online Shorts?
Is your short online and your heart is set on premiering it for audiences at the Cannes, Berlin, Edinburgh, Maryland or Chicago International film festivals? Well, kiss those dreams goodbye as those five festivals are among a number of fests that disallow shorts that the filmmakers have previously placed online. The good news, however, is that an increasingly number of important festivals, including Sundance and SXSW, accept online shorts. The folks at Short of the Week have compiled the Essential List of Festivals and Online Eligibility, a list that concludes that two thirds of today’s fests welcome such submissions. View […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2013 -
Now Online: Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke
One of the most brilliantly out-there shorts of recent years, Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke has finally made it online, and you’d be a fool not to check it out. It’s the film that put the pair on the map when it played at the festival circuit in 2012, and then later justified their inclusion our “25 New Faces” list last year. Calling the film “both very smart and gleefully nuts,” this is what Scott wrote on Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke in his profile of Mayer and Leyva for the […]
by Nick Dawson on May 29, 2013 -
Tribeca Film Festival Shorts Programs Announced
The strong Tribeca lineup is bolstered by a very promising selection of shorts programs, which were announced today. While this year’s Sundance shorts slate was stacked with work by filmmakers who had features already under their belts, the TFF lineup does not include a lot of well-known names, which is always exciting. Among the shorts I’m particularly looking forward to are the non-fiction Wilt Chamberlain: Borscht Belt Bellhop, about an unchronicled part of the basketball icon’s life; Grandma’s Not a Toaster, written by Shawn Christensen, who just won Best Short at the Oscars for Curfew, a Tribeca favorite from last […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 11, 2013 -
HEADS UP: SUNDANCE SHORTSLABS
Strangely, the details of the 2012 Sundance ShortsLabs passed us by when they were announced a couple of weeks ago. (Particularly strange as both Scott and I are involved in panels at the NYC event in June!) So, I’m playing catch up now by posting the info on the workshops, including the first to be held in Seattle, which is currently undergoing an indie filmmaking renaissance. So, from the press release, here’s the skinny on this year’s excellent events: ShortsLabs offer filmmakers first-hand insight and access into the world of short filmmaking through panels and sessions with industry representatives, as […]
by Nick Dawson on May 23, 2012
