The Legend of the Five Rings

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. FX Goby gets us into a competitive mood with the BBC’s extremely impressive animated trailer for the Olympics.

2. More alum news: Georgi Banks-Davies (Garfield) is a hot commodity in TV. She directed 5 eps of the Greek mythology show Kaos, set to debut on Netflix next month and now will helm all 6 episodes of Night Manager S2 for BBC.

3. The big industry news of the week was Bloomberg’s reporting that Apple is pulling back its spending on its AppleTV+ streaming service, signaling (another) final end to the streaming wars. Indiewire has the non-paywall recap.

4. Optimistic notes for independent theaters emerge from Art House Convergence in their annual audience survey, suggesting increased attendance and a broad demographic appeal for independent films.

5. Prolific and popular independent filmmaker Jim Cummings released another short film online this week, Is Now a Good Time? Indiewire dove deep with its story, which includes quotes from Jim and team.

6. The celebrity “executive producer” trend for award season is starting early in 2024! Joe Weiland (Gorka) lands Cate Blanchett for his Venice-bound short film, Marion.

7. Metaverse and VR talk has slowed in favor of AI hysteria, but Matthew Ball is back on the topic with insightful interviews with execs from Epic and Meta, timed to the release of a new edition of his book.

8. A dream team of animators assembled for the latest Coldplay music video.

9. Look at that! Friends of the site, Cartoon Brew, are releasing their very first print edition.

10. Finally, for this week’s theatrical recommendation, go see DÌDI (弟弟)! From Sean Wang, this Asian-American coming-of-age story was one of our favorite films out of Sundance this year and it open in limited release from Focus Features today. Find Tickets.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

💡 Product Updates

❤️ Following

The “For You” row on the Shortverse homepage has become “Following”. Formerly it would show only new releases from filmmakers you follow. Now the feed is more robust, showing more activity from people you follow (likes, comments, releases, credits).

We hope this brings a level of social vetting to the discovery of new shorts and increases the utility of following more people on the platform including programmers, curators, and other non-filmmakers.

🪐 Shortverse Collections

🏅Going for Gold: An Olympics-themed Collection

With the opening ceremony tonight, we’ve compiled our own Olympic-sized playlist over on Shortverse. Featuring the best short films centred around sports from the games — from boxing to swimming and cycling to fencing — these films capture the highs and lows and the sweat and tears of competitive sports.

On your mark, get set, watch!