AI Boom or Gloom?

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Oscar® Best Animated Short: Now Streaming - Fresh off its win on March 15th, The NFB has made The Girl Who Cried Pearls available for free for audiences worldwide on its website and app. I hope this would be the case in my S/W write-up the night of the show, so if you haven’t experienced this fascinating fable yet, check it out now!

2. SXSW Awards! - Deadline has the winners from last weekend’s awards. Big ups to alum Renée Marie Petropoulos on winning the narrative shorts comp! Not listed is the result of Redbreast’s sponsored side competition, which was taken by another S/W alum, Pranav Bhasin. Also, we’re ecstatic for Graham Parkes! Winner of our ‘Short of the Year’ for The Voice in Your Head, his feature debut, Wishful Thinking, took home the prestigious Narrative Jury Prize. Filmmaker Mag caught up with him before the announcement.

3. The Ouray Film Sabbatical - A powerful initiative designed to bring together filmmakers, critics, programmers, and other industry participants in a shared space of reflection and exchange, the debut edition of the Ouray Film Sabbatical took place earlier this month. Short of the Week’s Rob Munday was in attendance and shared his experience.

4. Annecy Announces its Shorts Lineup - The crown of the animation festival circuit, the French festival unveiled 34 films in its official selection, 51 additional shorts in various sidebars, and 43 student graduation films. What’s caught our eye? New films from Tiny Inventions, Anna Mantzaris, and Hisko Hulsing have us salivating.

5. Disney+ Debuts New Shorts - Subscribers to Disney+ who are also short film fans have much to be excited about. Versa, the company’s big Oscar contender from the past year, is now streaming. Also, two new shorts from the company’s internal talent development program, Short Circuit, premiered. Maddie & The Test and Life Drawings are available here. Finally, Mickey himself shows up in a new short that teams the iconic company mascot with what is arguably the company’s most valuable property—Bluey.

6. Watch: Solutions Story Project from Vid Consortium - This cool storytelling fellowship from The Video Consortium and Skoll Foundation connects regional filmmakers with social innovators to produce social change docs. The 2025-2026 cohort focused on Asia, and the five films are out now on YouTube.

7. New Non-Profit Foundation to Support LGBTQ Filmmakers - Hollywood Reporter has the scoop on an exciting new initiative to support queer filmmakers in the wake of the industry’s DEI pullback. Spearheaded by Adam Goldman, The Necessary Foundation has lined up prominent artists like Bowen Yang, Lena Waithe, and Alan Cumming as board members, and promises financial support and mentoring for early-career filmmakers.

8. Spotlight on Indy Shorts - Taking place in Indianapolis in July, the prominent shorts fest is where this year’s Oscar-winner, Sam Davis (The Singers), first qualified his film. Fresh off a Gotham workshop on short film distro strategies (thanks for the shoutout!), the fest has upgraded its listing on Shortverse in advance of its April 5th final submission deadline. Check it out.

9.  PBS Launches Rebranded YouTube Presence - Now PBS Documentaries, the new channel pulls together factual content from various PBS and ITVS strands, including POV, Independent Lens, and PBS Digital Studios. Oscar short film contenders Chasing Time and Songs of Black Folk are expected to hit the channel this Spring.

10. Last Call to Support Short Films Through ‘Long Story Short’ - Kickstarter annually turns the month of March over to short film projects, and I like to support a few. Check out the initiative’s landing page to browse projects and look for the gold ribbon for projects the Kickstarter Film Team recommends.

🤖 AI Corner

It’s been a wild few weeks in AI, led by the surprise shuttering of OpenAI’s video model/social app a few days ago. Bye Sora! My 8-year-old’s friend group used you like crazy for 48hrs before losing interest, which probably signaled you weren’t long for the world. We’ll always have that cat playing music on the porch, though.

It’s clear this move is more about OpenAI and their competition with Anthropic than it is about video-gen itself, so cheers from anti-AI activists are probably premature. Still, it’s definitely the short-term death of video-gen as a free, mass-consumer activity. AI video will be locked into a prosumer subscription and credit-buying model for the foreseeable future. Anyway, let’s jump into Sora, Seedance, and horny fruit people(!?) in a new edition of AI Corner.

• OpenAI Scraps Sora Video Platform Months After Launch - WSJ

• Disney’s OpenAI Deal Just Got Spiked. Maybe That’s Lucky? - Variety

• Sora Is Dead… And Literally No One Cares (lol) - Medium

• Kudos to Scott Belsky, who called it—‘why Sora won’t work’ - X.com

• Not Only Sora Died…RIP Erotic Chatbots - Financial Times

• Jia Zhangke Creates AI Video With Seedance 2.0 - Variety

• Senators tell ByteDance to shut down Seedance 2.0 'immediately' - engadget

• Introducing CapCut Video Studio - x.com

• Viral AI Returns: Seedance 2.0 Now Available in CapCut - NoFilmSchool

• Asteria Launches Continuum Suite, AI-Enabled OS For Production - Deadline

• Runway Sponsors “Big Ad Contest” with $100k in Cash Prizes - YouTube

• Multi-Shot App from Runway Debuts - x.com

• NVIDIA & Runway Achieve Real-Time Video Generation - Petapixel

• Attend Runway AI Summit: NYC March 31st - Runway

• AI Actress ‘Tilly Norwood’ Drops MV - Deadline

• Val Kilmer Resurrected by AI to Star in Movie - Variety

• The Story Behind All Those Fruit and Veggie AI Slop Videos - NyMag

• A Profile of the Emerging AI Auteur: Gossip Goblin - Hollywood Reporter

• Pro-Iran AI Video Shorts Go Viral - The Hill

• China Explains the Straight of Hormuz Crisis in AI Martial Arts Short - x.com

• Weekend Watch: The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist - We close this AI Corner out with its own special version of the Weekend Watch. We’ve been talking about it since its Sundance premiere, and now the new doc from S/W alum Charlie Tyrell and Daniel Roher is out in US theaters! A father-to-be tries to figure out what is happening with all this AI insanity in this urgent ideas film. This piece in Variety gives a brief overview of the approach and preoccupations of the film, and we also recommend this long-form conversation with the film’s producers, Ted Tremper and Daniel Kwan. I’ve got a ticket for tonight, and will let you know what I think next week!

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🪐 Into the Shortverse

🏳️‍⚧️ Celebrating International Transgender Day of Visibility

Trans stories are human stories, and in the midst of a scary time of backlash in the US, we’re proud to share these films that can help foster empathy, understanding, and y’know…entertain and do all the other stuff we ask great short films to do! We’ve built a big collection of over 30 shorts on Shortverse. Check it out.