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📅 This Week on Short of the Week

As teased in the intro, yesterday Short of the Week released its first editorial video since…the short-lived PBS Digital series Ivan Kander hosted back in like 2013!?! Rob decided to rectify it with the first installment of a new series, Short Film Explained, where we invite filmmaker insight into works that capture popular fascination. We begin with Tim Egan’s Curve, which, with over 10M views and 13k+ comments, has certainly struck a nerve with online audiences. Thanks to Tim for his time and Rekka for helping put it together. If you like the idea of us doing more pieces like this, please watch and leave a comment to encourage us!

Onto the fresh picks of the week, we kicked things off with Luke Barnett and Tanner Thomason's emotional and poetic ghost story, The Crossing Over Express. Barnett is a familiar face as an actor and a producer, but he makes his directing debut alongside Thomason in this short. Rob praises the pair, noting “both tonally and visually, the duo nailed it, crafting a film that is haunting, heartfelt, and refreshingly unique.”

Then we finally had a chance to highlight a film we’ve long admired, Roman Hodel’s immersive and sensory documentary that fixes its lens on the most overlooked person on the greatest sporting pitches—the referee. The result is unusually spellbinding.

Finally Céline reviews David Se Va from Joel Villegas Saldaña. An attractive work, told across two time periods, the film visualizes a young man set against himself. As the director admits, “I’ve been going back and forth between Mexico and the US my whole life so I think that making a film like this was really inevitable.” The result is a piece that “immerses us in the space between two places – geographically, emotionally and chronologically.”

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Announcements From the “Made On YouTube” Event - YouTube descended on NYC for a big creator event this week (thanks for the invite guys 🙄). A bunch of new stuff was announced which you can read about on the official blog. Amid a myriad of AI features what caught my eye though was something called HYPE. It’s a new leaderboard for channels under 500,000 subscribers. Hypes are sort of “super-likes” and everyone on YouTube will get 3 “hypes” a week to boost a video from a smaller creator. Here’s a longer explanation.

   Now we’re too big to benefit from this, but if you’re not fortunate enough to be able to premiere a film with us, or you’d like to grow your own YouTube presence at the same time, this sounds like a homerun which helps address the many ways short filmmakers have been traditionally disadvantaged on the platform. Thinking about writing more about this soon, let me know if that’s something you want to read!

2.  Diagonale Hits 100M Views on S/W YouTube!!! - An uncomfortably real and relatable story of casual boundary-crossing within a relationship may not strike you as a crowd-pleaser, but this short from filmmaker Anne Thorens has, via the power of its scenario and its raw, unflinching depiction, proven itself as an unforgettable work to millions. Congrats on the truly absurd milestone—the film is only 1M views away from overtaking Taylor Swift’s short!

3. AI Video Company Runway Partners With Lionsgate - From the press release, “Lionsgate and Runway have entered into a first-of-its-kind partnership centered around the creation and training of a new AI model, customized on Lionsgate’s proprietary catalog.” This precise type of deal was a flashpoint during the recent guild labor negotiations.

4. Adobe AI Video Generation Coming This Year - Potentially a bigger deal is the announcement that Adobe’s Firefly Video Model is being rolled out to consumers in apps, including Premiere. Text-to-video generation in the world’s popular video editor? Even if Runway or Sora are better, the power of defaults is huge and that accessibility could come to be remembered as a tipping point in the adoption of the technology at large.

5. New Guidelines for AI Use Published - Often it feels like all the momentum in AI is with the technologists, but work is apace to regulate and provide guidelines for responsible use. The Archival Producers Alliance just released a document on best practices for generative AI use in documentaries.

6. Netflix Drops Biannual Viewing Report - The latest data dump from the streamer just dropped. Looks like the UK was a big winner with 4 of the top 10 shows, though I don’t recognize the top one…😔

7. Watch Shorts From Venice For a Limited Time - Over on Festival Scope, select shorts are playing through the end of the month. You need tickets, but the tickets are free with a free FestivalScope account.

8. Student Academy Award Winners Announced - Congrats to the 15 winners across 3 categories, they will be honored Oct. 14th in a ceremony in London. The films automatically qualify now for the senior competition, and history suggests that at least one of these will get an Oscar nomination…

9. Bernardo Britto’s Omni Loop Out Today - Beloved for his absurd yet poignant animations like Yearbook, Glove, and Hudson Geese, Bernardo Britto’s feature-length live-action sci-fi film, Omni Loop, starring Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) starts its rollout today in theaters and on VOD. Find tickets and watch the trailer on the Magnolia website.

10. Richard Gadd Emmy Speech Calls For Decision Makers to be Brave - We didn’t have much of a rooting interest at the Emmys on Sunday (though much love to alum Maegan Houang of the Shogun writer’s room on their big night). However, Richard Gadd (Baby Reindeer) inspired us and many creatives currently persevering through the industry downturn and the murky future of the creative medium. Bravo sir.

🪐 Into the Shortverse

📱Phone-y Filmmaking

You don’t need me to tell you that the latest iPhone arrives today and that changes to its camera are one of the new model’s biggest draws. Camera features sell billions of dollars of phones each year. They are a leading differentiator for some of the biggest companies in the world. As capabilities grow it is no longer a novelty to see phones used in big productions.

It was a novelty at one point though, and despite years of marketing to filmmakers and some classic works born from camera phones, short film has always had an awkward relationship with the technology. It should be a perfect match—when you’re a broke filmmaker what’s better than the free camera already in your pocket? However, because of that accessibility, and the sacrifice in quality, phones as a filmmaking tool have had to fight the perception of amateurishness. For a master like Soderbergh who has shot multiple feature films on a phone, who cares!? For those who aspire to be Soderbergh, proving that you are capable of professional-level work using professional tools is perceived as important.

However, there are some real gems from over the years. Early on, contests and restraints birthed surprising creativity from unknown talents. In recent years, many household names have been given big budgets in the name of product marketing and allowed to go wild on opulent shorts. Timed to today’s Apple release, our curators spent time pulling together this collection of films that bridge these eras and celebrate some of the best short films shot on phones. ➡ View the Collection

Also on Shortverse this week… 

🎊 Fantastic Fest 2024 Shorts Lineup

The USA’s top genre festival is underway in Austin, TX, preview the shorts lineup. With a broad mix of animation, documentary, horror, sci-fi and a special focus this year on Arab genre works, it is another killer lineup from programmer Jean Anne Lauer, who we profiled last year.

🔎 Spotlight on: Jonathan Salmon

Last night I was invited out to a small screening by the filmmaker Jonathan Salmon, best known for his Bizarro World series of micro-shorts released on Instagram and later featured on Short of the Week.

It was the last night of a 3-city tour where he rented out a theater and played his own shorts. I was charmed by the Seattle native’s chutzpah and impressed by the process he and his loose and rotating network of collaborators use to make shorts on minuscule budgets.

Short of the Week was born on the web and has always championed the web, but sometimes I feel like we fixate too much on the festival world. Seeing Salmon succeed in a DIY way and build a reputation through social networks was refreshing, and the shorts are, of course, very funny. The filmmaker is prolific, and the films are sketches that work as reels on IG and TikTok but also possess cinematic taste and execution. Salmon’s not there yet, but spiritually it reminded me of what Peter Atencio was able to achieve with Key and Peele. Anyway, I think we’re going to keep hearing from Salmon, so give him a follow on Shortverse and on Instagram.