Go With the Flow

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Secret Level Anthology Debuts December 10th - Teased back in August, a new project from the team behind Love Death + Robots hits Amazon Prime next week. The series will have 16 animated short films inspired by classic video games, featuring voice talent like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves. The series also gets some interesting Amazon-related wrinkles, including a microsite where you can blend watching with shopping and hunt down codes from the internet to exchange for hidden content and digital collectibles.

2. Netflix Unveils “Fresh Perspective: Short Films” - 12 shorts hit the streaming platform this week from US and Canadian creators, supported by the Netflix Fund For Creative Equity. We know several of these from the festival circuit, playing fests like SXSW and the Berlinale. Read more about the initiative here and watch the shorts in this collection.

3. The NFB and Mikrofilm Premiere the “Torill Kove Online Festival” - The Norwegian-Canadian animator, an Oscar®-winner in 2007 with The Danish Poet, is back in the running this year with her latest short, Maybe Elephants (which is delightful as usual). Her longtime collaborators are now streaming highlights from her career online including The Danish Poet, as well as the Oscar®-nominated Me and My Moulton which, to my recollection, has not been available for free streaming before. Cartoon Brew has the story and links to the films.

4. Carlos López Estrada to Launch Next-Gen Short Film Studio - From Deadline: “Antigravity Academy, the production company of Oscar-nominated filmmaker Carlos López Estrada, has partnered with Dolby Laboratories to launch a new studio, designed to amplify the voices of emerging filmmakers.” This is a cool opp with a $35k grant to make your short, plus mentoring from Antigravity and Dolby. Applications are open and run through Jan 3rd, 2025.

5. Award Season Officially Kicks Off - The first major show of the season, NYC’s Gotham Awards took place Monday night. Here are the winners, and you can watch the entire show on Variety’s YouTube channel. Congrats to alum Greg Kwedar whose A24 feature, Sing Sing, was recognized in the acting categories. Also The Gotham’s West Coast equivalent, Film Independent’s Spirit Awards, announced its nominees.

6. Award-winning Short Dream Creep lands on Mubi - Probably our favorite genre short of the year, the festival hit Dream Creep is now streaming on Mubi. The SVOD service is getting more into shorts, having recently grabbed Sundance ‘24 fave Bob’s Funeral as well as Golden Bear winner An Odd Turn. We’ll be keeping an eye on whether the service continues to be an active sales outlet for shorts!

7. TikTok Strikes Up a Partnership with Red Sea Festival - Underway right now in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the young festival is making a splash, having just brought TikTok on as a major sponsor. Most interesting to us is TikTok hosting a parallel short film contest on their platform, similar to what they’ve done at Cannes.

8. NBCU Names Latest TV Directors Class - The initiative mentors “experienced directors with distinct points of view” to give them their break into episodic television, culminating with the participants directing an episode of the show they shadow on. Deadline has the story, and kudos to S/W alums Winter Dunn and Liz Sargent for their selections, and shoutout to alum Dinh Thai for serving as a mentor!

9. Weekly Longread - Matt Zoller Seitz on Barry Jenkins - I really enjoyed Zoller Seitz going deep with Barry Jenkins on his new Lion King prequel for New York Magazine. Disney, somewhat bafflingly to me, has gone hard the last 5 to 6 years on recruiting indie talents to write and direct big big IP projects. This is in theory cool, I love filmmakers getting that bag, but they are inexperienced in the ways of modern blockbuster production and, historically, have not been creatively empowered to showcase the talent and sensibilities that got them on Disney’s radar in the first place. This story provides fascinating insight on an artist in the belly of the content beast.

10. “The Algorithm Has Been Hiding Something From You” - Kirby Ferguson, well known for his video essay series Everything is a Remix is a creator and thinker we’ve been following for years. He’s got a new video up in the NyTimes on the seeming creative stagnation that has resulted from algorithmic social media and what we can potentially do about it. Check it out.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🔎 Spotlight On: FLOW

The feature-length animation Flow goes nation-wide in American theaters today. From Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, the Cannes-premiering film is one of the most acclaimed of the year, having just taken home Best Animated Feature from the New York Film Critic’s Circle and is currently a front-runner in the race for Oscar®.

We’ve mentioned the film a few times this year, but why are we making such a big deal about a feature film?

Some of it is parochial—we’ve been supporters of Zilbalodis for over a decade, having featured his short film work on multiple occasions and interviewing him in 2019. This new film is also loosely adapted from his breakout 2012 short film Aqua, so there’s that connection.

But I’m also just really fascinated by his career arc and how it might prove instructive for the independent creators we routinely cover. The short film animation space bursts with creativity—a multiplicity of styles, techniques, genres, and subjects bloom. However, feature film animation is comparatively sparse, and is treated as a domain for big studios, especially when it comes to projects that aspire to mainstream appeal.

However, technology is heralding a golden age of innovative approaches to feature animation. Zilbalodis was an early adopter of real-time animation techniques, and that allowed him to transition to features largely as a solo creator with 2019’s Away. Flow is a big step up but, at an estimated $4M budget, it is comparable to a hi-profile indie rather than the 9-figure budgets of major studio films. It was animated in the open-source tool Blender, and though the animation team hovered around 50 people, the majority of the creative development was achieved by Zilbalodis with a small 3 to 4-person team. This effort produced the film’s animatic, using many of the same real-time workflows as his earlier work, allowing Zilbalodis to “discover” the film's shots via virtual cameras.

After a successful European theatrical run, the US release is producing a host of good articles that dive deeper into this process for those interested: Cartoon Brew has one, and Indiewire hosts an exclusive making-of video. Whether it gets the Oscar® or not, Flow looks like a film that will be remembered and referenced for years to come, so catch Flow fever with me—we even have a board game we can all play!

⏱️ Race For AI Video Supremacy is Here

The novelty has worn off a bit from AI video and we’re still, to my mind, awaiting our first AI video masterpiece. But, the tools keep getting better, and the medium is about to get a bunch of fresh attention as some of the biggest companies in the world made major product announcements this week.

• The current leader in the space, Runway, has been maintaining an impressive shipping schedule. But their latest feature, Keyframing, might be the most impactful yet.

• OpenAI is close to releasing its long-teased generative video tool Sora, promising it in the next few days via its 12 Days of OpenAI product roll-out.

• Amazon jumped into the game, announcing Nova, a new family of models with text, image, and (yes)video generation capabilities.

• Chinese tech giant, Tencent, wades into generative video with HunyuanVideo a new 13B parameter, open-source model.

• Google unveiled Veo, their “most capable video generation model”, hyping its image-to-video capabilities.

• Perhaps even more impressive from Google was the news of Genie 2, described as “a foundation world model capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments.”

It seems that the entirety of the tech elite are placing bets on generative AI video now, and the pace of development is accelerating even faster.