Moving FAST

📺 Short of the Week is Bringing Shorts to FAST Channels

We’re thrilled to finally share some exciting news! Short of the Week is teaming up with LOL Network, the digital arm of Kevin Hart's media company, Hartbeat, to bring hours of comedy shorts to their popular AVOD and FAST channels.

In a new series called Shorties, we’ll co-present curated collections of the best comedies from our 15+ years of programming, available both on-demand and via linear channels.

Why LOL? As early adopters of AVOD and FAST, they’re now a major player, with prominent placements on Tubi, Pluto, Roku Channel, and more. Their commitment to amplifying fresh talent and underrepresented voices aligns perfectly with our mission, and those platform partnerships, plus over 5M YouTube subscribers, mean LOL has the reach to help us bring these films to a wider audience. Participating filmmakers will be compensated for their work via artist-friendly, non-exclusive deals, making this partnership even more rewarding.

The collaboration kicks off this Sunday, 10/13 at 730pm ET with Scary AF, a 30-minute horror-comedy collection debuting on LOL’s YouTube, just in time for spooky season.

Stay tuned for more updates, and if you’re an S/W alum, let us know if you’d like your short featured!

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

We kicked off the week with Madhu, a simple and delicate Indian story that I adore from the brother and sister combo of Tanmay & Tanvi Chowdhary. A nostalgic story about the coming together of old friends with a subtle queer undercurrent, the filmmakers question “Whether our experiences and emotions ever truly fade, or if they remain suspended in the ether, always a part of us, quietly shaping the present”.

Kailee McGee won SXSW’s Audience Award this year for this wild meta-fictional dive into her own experience of fighting breast cancer. The intensely personal film is also a crowd-pleaser though as Céline believes it, “strikes the perfect balance between comedy and drama, with one enhancing the other in a way I’ve rarely seen on screen when tackling such heavy subjects.”

Céline also covered Alex Casimir’s latest which tells a racial story that “plays with genre to vividly illustrate the discomfort of standing out and the anxiety it creates, all through the prism of a coming-of-age narrative centered around one of the most universal school rites of passage.”

Then on Thursday Caroline Creaghead, previously known to us as a producer, shared Relationship to Person. Starring short film queen Eleanore Pienta and voice acting star H Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers), the film is loosely based on a real experience of Creaghead’s. Céline is a fan, saying the short delivers “…the perfect combo of emotion and laughter.”

Rekka then breaks up Céline review week with her take on the second of Gobelin’s 2024 grad films, Wormwood. A mature contrast to last week’s Layla, this contemplative short is set in a fantasy world, but its themes are deeply rooted in reality.

Finally, shout out to our September Best of the Month recipients which were announced last Saturday. Our programming team selected works from Ömer Sami, Evan Mann, and Jeanette Jeanenne. Cheers!

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Apple Releases First Scripted Immersive Short for Apple Vision Pro - Teased at WWDC in June, this high-profile short is one of the most anticipated films of the year, but, ironically, could end up relatively underseen due to its exclusivity to Apple’s $3500 headset. Victoria Song at the Verge has a review, with a headline that calls the film “…everything impressive and isolating about the Vision Pro”

2. COSM Makes a Splash With Its Communal Immersive Spaces - Song’s complaint about Vision Pro’s isolation got me thinking about the new trend of immersive spaces that tackle the problem of shared experience head-on. The Sphere in Las Vegas is the most noteworthy example and filmmakers from our orbit like Factory Fifteen have produced content for it. But, I recently learned about COSM, a more intimate venue, after seeing videos of Premier League soccer games screened at their LA venue on social media. Right on time, the head of COSM’s Studio and Labs showed up on the Future of Storytelling podcast this week in an illuminating chat that I recommend. They are commissioning original work for the venues and filmmakers like Planetary Collective, who created the iconic short, Overview, have made work for them.

3. Don Hertzfeldt’s Latest Short Comes to VOD - After a months-long roadshow of theatrical screenings, Hertzfeltd’s 21-minute animation, ME, hits Vimeo On Demand today. I caught it here in New York, where the filmmaker revealed that his long-in-development feature, Antarctica, will soon be made with the support of Ari Aster. In impressions I left on Shortverse I called ME, “…an impressive effort to expand his artistry in new directions.”

4. Aardman Produces Tribute Short for Over The Garden Wall Anniversary - One of the most iconic American animations of the past decade, Cartoon Network’s limited series from Patrick McHale has become a cult classic and a perennial fall re-watch. Originally a short film proof-of-concept, the series will be commemorated with a new stop-motion animation from Aardman upon the 10th anniversary of its release, this Nov. 3rd.

   

5. Meta enters AI video wars with powerful Movie Gen, set for 2025 - Text-to-video generative AI is a red-hot competition with Runway’s early lead being chipped at by new entrants and impressive Chinese competitors. I suggested a few weeks ago that Adobe might have the trump card due to distribution via its vast creative cloud install base, but now VentureBeat has the story that text-to-video tech dubbed “Movie Gen” will be coming to all of Meta’s apps in 2025 including Instagram(!) Do network effects make Meta’s dominance a foregone conclusion?

6. Are You Really a Producer? - The Producers Guild of America is cracking down on the “vanity credits” that have diluted the meaning of the title producer and made it more difficult to ascertain what it is that a producer actually does. This is something that Dear Producer highlighted back in April, so kudos to the guild for choosing to address it.

7. Celebrating 10 Years of Loading Docs - Last week the latest batch of shorts from New Zealand’s Loading Docs hit the internet. It also marked the innovative program’s 10th anniversary. I was lucky enough to serve as a mentor for the very first cohort in 2013, and am proud of Julia Parnell and her team on the milestone! To mark the occasion, we had Loading Docs choose 10 films from the 10 years to highlight in a special Shortverse collection.

8. Should indie filmmakers embrace or avoid FAST and AVoD platforms? - Geared more towards microbudget feature filmmakers, but in light of our big announcement up top, I recommend this balanced piece that dives into the pros/cons of distributing on these increasingly important content platforms.

9. Dìdi 弟弟 Hits Peacock - S/W fave Sean Wang’s celebrated Sundance feature debut is now streaming for Peackcock subscribers. A nostalgic story of an Asian-American skate kid in 2000s California, it was one of our favorite films from this year’s festival.

10. New Feature from the Most-Decorated S/W Duo Ever - Kudos to Celine Held and Logan George, the husband-and-wife directing team who are responsible for a record six Short of the Week selections. A few years ago they made it into M. Night Shyamalan’s orbit, directing episodes of his AppleTV+ show, Servant. Now the prominent director has produced their new MAX Original feature, Caddo Lake, which premiered on Thursday. The logine: When an 8-year-old girl goes missing, a family’s secrets resurface. Watch the trailer below!