Gotta Collect 'Em All

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Aardman x Cartoon Network short celebrates Over the Garden Wall Anniversary - Teased this a few weeks ago and here it is! I wondered if our friends Mikey Please and Dan Ojari would be involved, and sure enough, they directed the 3-minute piece. The film is primarily fan service, but the subject is worthy of it—the miniseries is a modern classic of American animation and one of the great projects to come from the - now-gutted - Cartoon Network Studios. Animation Obsessive reviews the show’s legacy, while Ojari and Please discuss their new short in Fast Company. If you’re curious about what this is all about, check out Tome of the Unknown, the short film that kicked everything off!

2. New Report Suggests Massive Untapped Audience for Indie Films - Keri Putnam, the former long-time chief of Sundance, has published a massive new report to make the case that “There is a larger audience for independent film in the US than current viewership.” Brian Newman reacts to the key findings.

3. More Stop-Motion Fun—Kirsten Lepore for Apple - The new Mac Mini is getting rave reviews from creatives, but we care more about the creatives who made this charming advert! Well done Kirsten and Ian Gilbert!

4. A Sneak Peek at Scavengers Reign S2, but Will Anyone Fund It? - We’ve talked a lot about this show over the past year. The animated sci-fi series is not only from a team of S/W alums and based on a 2016 short, it is also just one of the best sci-fi shows ever. Starting on the Max streaming service before moving to Netflix, co-creator Joe Bennett confirmed on Instagram that the show will NOT be getting a second season from Netflix while sharing a teaser for a prospective second season that the team made in-house.

joe_bennett_animation

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4. Q&A with Don Hertzeldt at RogerEbert.com - Collin Souter, who runs an enjoyable “Short Films in Focus” column for the website as an interview with Hertzfeldt promoting the VOD release of his latest short, ME.

5. Watch European Film Award Contenders for Free - Festival Scope is metering out free online ‘tickets’ to watch acclaimed shorts in the running for Europe’s top prize. We highly recommend A Kind of Testament and A Study of Empathy.

6. We Direct Music Videos’ Library of Treatments Moves to Reddit - The org announced on Instagram the return of its popular treatment database with a new Reddit home. See the treatments of top contemporary videos, but also a terrific collection of archival finds for classics from Chris Milk, Spike Jonze, and others.

7. Alum Development Headlines - With some hi-profile spec sales, and the American Film Market ongoing, there is optimism that the cold spell in Hollywood is starting to thaw. We certainly saw a lot of alums with headlines in the trades this week including:

• Luke Barnett and Tanner Thomason, fresh off the viral release of The Crossing Over Express, pen a zombie script that Mike Flanagan will Exec-Produce.

•  Ariel Zengotita (Flick) is in the inaugural class of Jordan Peele’s ‘No Drama’ initiative

• Nikyatu Jusu is developing a film set in the universe of Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’ for 20th Century Studios.

• Michael Angelo Covino (The Climb) has cast Succession star Nicholas Braun in his latest comedy for Neon and Topic Studios.

• Matty Brown’s anticipated debut feature, The Sand Castle, will hit Netflix in 2025

• Romain Gavras Casts Anya Taylor-Joy in Sacrifice.

8. Your Weekly Long-Read - Kyle Chayka expands on a frequent theme of his over the past year in “The Banality of Online Recommendation Culture” for the New Yorker.

9. What To Watch This Weekend - We’ve got two alums with films out in the USA this week. One of our favorite animators, Jérémy Clapin, is in theaters with Meanwhile On Earth, a live-action/animation hybrid that is the filmmaker’s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated debut, I Lost My Body.

   Also, in theaters and on VOD is Starring Jerry as Himself from Law Chen. The biggest hit out of Slamdance last year, the tricky-to-classify film is categorized as a doc, but has strong narrative drama and thriller influences with filmed recreations. The story of a Chinese immigrant drawn unwillingly into a sting operation, check out the trailer below!

🤝 How To Work With Short of the Week This Award Season

We’ve been getting peppered with questions from award-season competitors already, with many FYC campaigns underway, so today on the website, I laid out how best we can help your film this award season. I go in-depth in the piece, but the KISS version is:

1. Make a Free Shortverse Page for Your Film - Get discovery on our huge short film platform, benefit from our release tools, and be featured in collections of contenders.

2. Submit to Short of the Week - Guarantees you’re on our radar, with the possibility of becoming an Official Selection with a dedicated review on the site, social media posts, and mention as a selection in our award season coverage.

3. Decide on Paid Promo Options - Options to promote your FYC film, including on the S/W website, Shortverse, our 1.5M-subscriber YouTube channel, and this newsletter, just like the above-example for one of our favorites of the year, A Crab in the Pool.

📚 Collections!

This is one I’ve wanted since forever. Now, on Shortverse, everyone can create their own groups of films as a private or public collection!

Collections are a useful tool to gather films you want to Save or Watch Later or as a place to stockpile favorites for your end-of-year “Best of” list. You can be the curator now, showing off your taste within a genre, style, or theme. Programmers can group films by short film block or festival year. We look forward to this new way of discovering hidden gems.

• Tap the bookmark icon on a film page to add a film to a collection.

• Collections can be public or private

• Write a description to add context to a collection.

• On film pages, we show public collections that the film is included in as a way to discover other similar films.

We’ll be keeping an eye out for interesting public collections to feature on the homepage!