Adjusting Our Look

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Apple announced at WWDC its first scripted immersive experience for the Vision Pro headset is a short film—Submerged from Oscar-nominated German director Edward Berger. They also announced they are partnering with Vimeo on an app that will host user-generated 100-degree 8k video for the device.

2. Vimeo’s new CEO makes clear that they will not train generative models on user videos without explicit consent. Looking at the new CEO’s resume though, I’m still convinced that AI will be a big part of the company’s future.

3. AI’s big week at Tribeca is underway. Runway’s screening arrived and showcased the premiere of a new film from a creative team I adore. Next up, OpenAI’s screening is tomorrow night.

4. Are brands the future of film? At Tribeca X, Oscar-winner Ben Proudfoot showed off his latest short film, a partnership with L’Oreal, and Starbucks announced a new content studio alongside our friends and S/W investors, Sugar23. Fast Company delves deeper.

5. Question: Where Have Pixar Short Films Gone?

6. “What the f*ck is happening in distribution and what are we supposed to do about it?” A new resource from Kinema and Seed & Spark aggregates best practices for indie filmmakers in one place. The short film section is a little light though, should we contribute to it?

7. A pair of upcoming online classes from Sundance Collab are geared toward short filmmakers: Producing Your Short Film with experienced producer Andrew Carlberg & Exploring Independent Cinema: From Shorts to Features which dives deep into the experiences of Damien Chazelle, Ana Lily Aminpour, and others when making their short-to-feature adaptations.

8. Your weekly alum watch recommends: First Omen from Arkasha Stevenson hits Disney+ and Late Bloomers from Lisa Steen is on VOD.

9. Cheers to alum and internet favorite, Joe Cappa, as his Adult Swim SMALLS online show, Ha Ha You Clowns, gets picked up as a full series. Celebrate the triumph of these beefy boys by watching this weird new music video Cappa did for Delicate Steve.

10. This is adorable—students at Gobelins Animation School pay tribute to legendary professor Fred Nagorny on the eve of his retirement with - what else? - an animated short.

🎊 Festival News

Céline is wrapping up a jury stint at KortfilmFestivalen before trekking to the States for Palm Springs Shortfest. The biggest short film fest in America, things kick off on Thursday—more on that next week though!

First, some news from fests ongoing….

TRIBECA FESTIVAL

Tribeca announced its winners last night. Apropos of pride month the lesbian romance Ripe! took home the narrative shorts award. For docs Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World is the winner, and the Iranian short, In the Shadow of the Cypress, gets the animation prize. All three are Oscar-qualified now, congrats!

Also a big shout to Graham Parkes—winner of our “Short of the Year” in 2021 for The Voice Inside Your Head. His game, Goodbye Universe won the category at Tribeca! Below is the just-released teaser with Lewis Pullman voicing a baby which you control in the first-person! Wishlist it now on Steam.

ANNECY

Arguably the most prestigious animation festival in the world is wrapping up soon too, having run from the 9th to the 15th.

Our curators put together films that caught our eye from the Competition: Official, including new work from an enfant terrible, our favorite stop-mo in ages and a much anticipated new film from a Scandinavian master. These are not released online yet but you can watch trailers and browse news articles for the selections while we work hard to bring them to you soon.

Some additional notes—Portugal is the highlighted country for this edition, so check out this Variety spotlight on the country’s emerging talents.

Also, a longtime favorite part of the fest is the bumpers created by students at Gobelins. Here is a YouTube Playlist of this year’s batch.

💡 Product Updates

A fresh new design for Shortverse pages rolls out today, with a condensed, information-rich layout that makes accessing parts of the page quicker and easier.

Notable changes include:

• Removing the player overlay so nothing interferes with the viewing experience.

• Making ratings and likes more prominent

• Numbers on tabs to make it clear where info is and isn’t.

• Moving comments higher on the page to facilitate more conversation

• Creating colorful hyperlinks out of tags that link to our powerful film search.

Try it out at Shortverse.com and give us your feedback. See you next time!