Look Back, Look Ahead

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. After 20 Years, What Do We Want From YouTube? - As the video giant turns 20, we reflect on its evolution from “cute cat videos” to a place short filmmakers need to be, while sketching out what we would still like to see.

2. Coverfly Shutters, as Online Script Sites Become Endangered - No Film School alerted us to the impending shutdown of the script competition management platform. This is on the heels of February’s news that Screencraft, The Script Lab, and Wescreenplay were to close, too. What’s going on? No one seems to know, but following the breadcrumbs is almost a parody of capitalist consolidation. After a decade of aggregating into a parent company, Industry Arts, the package of script sites was sold to Backstage in 2021 in an $200M acquisition frenzy that also saw Film Freeway, Voice 123, and The Mandy Network brought under Backstage's control. Mere months later, Backstage itself sold to Cast & Crew, the payroll and production management giant that owns Final Draft among other properties. Management shakeups at Cast & Crew presaged these closures, but what’s the plan?

3. Meet the New Sundance Lab Fellows - Switching to celebratory news, Sundance unveiled its fellows for its prestigious Director, Screenwriter, and Native Labs. This is often a direct pipeline to a buzzy debut feature premiere at the festival itself, and we’re pleased for all the incoming fellows, but especially for S/W alums Alex Nystrom (Four Nights and a Fire), Andrea Ellsworth and Kasey Elise Walker (The Dispute), and Alexandra Qin (Thirstygirl)!

4. Cannes Announces Official Selection Shorts + La Cinef - The short films of Cannes 2025 are now known. 11 films in the official selection and 16 in the student film competition, La Cinef, will be judged by an illustrious jury that includes S/W alum Reinaldo Marcus Green. In an interesting twist, two of the official competition films come from the same team of Filipino and Southeast Asian filmmakers. Fun!

5. Runway Introduces References - Consistency has been one of GenAI’s biggest bugaboos, so it’s a big deal that Runway thinks they’ve made a breakthrough with their new References release. The company recently held a 48-hour film competition, and you can see the tool in action in these Gen:48 shortlisted films.

6. Natasha Lyonne to Direct AI Feature Film - Co-written with Brit Marling, Lyonne will make her feature directing debut with Uncanny Valley, which will combine AI and traditional techniques. The film comes from Asteria Studios, the AI Studio from Bryn Mooser (co-founder of RYOT and XTR) that promises “ethical AI” utilizing “Marey,” its model trained on licensed data.

7.  Apple Suffers Major Legal Loss in Epic Games Case - This is a huge story, though a little outside our wheelhouse. Still, I can’t help but wonder if this defeat, which threatens Apple’s ability to take a 30% cut of any transaction in any app on an Apple device, has ramifications for short film. Will this now enable new business models that leverage in-app payments for short-form content, or even long-hypothesized micro-transactions? Something to keep an eye on, and I’d love to hear thoughts from smart readers!

8. Netflix Premieres “Proof of Concept” Shorts at LA Event - Cate Blanchett and Dr. Stacy L. Smith, famous for her Hollywood Diversity Reports through USC Annenberg, premiered the debut crop of short films to come from their women, trans, and non-binary accelerator. The selected filmmakers received $50,000 for their shorts as well as mentorship from a star-filled committee that included Chloé Zhao, Emma Corrin, Eva Longoria, Greta Gerwig, Jane Campion, Janicza Bravo, Lily Gladstone and Lilly Wachowski. Congrats to S/W alums Courtney Hoffman and Rebecca Halfon!

9. Directors Notes Awards - Our friends at Directors Notes held their in-person awards event last night. London’s finest were in attendance, including Serafima and Rob from our team. You can catch up on the winners here.

10. Weekend Watch: Starring Nicholas Cage as a man seeking to buy back his beachside childhood home only to be confronted by a pack of locals, The Surfer is a bracing thriller on masculinity that premieres in US theaters today. Having debuted at Cannes last year, it is from Lorcan Finnegan, whose short film Foxes graced the front page of Short of the Week a decade ago. Check the trailer for this latest feature below!

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

🪐 Into the Shortverse

Best of the Month: April ‘25

An Aardman PSA and a fashion advert that takes a surprising turn, are among the more unusual entries that sit beside the usual assortment of artistic animations and prestige dramas in this month’s selection of the best new releases on Shortverse.

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🤳🏼 Screenlife Short Films

Inspired by this week’s S/W official selection, hello beautiful please follow back, a collection of screenlife shorts that exploit the storytelling potential of modernity’s dominant communication mode.