The Happiest Holiday

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. New Episode of “Short Film Explained” - Rob sat with talented filmmaker Caleb Philips to revisit his ground-breaking viral hit Other Side of the Box. Check it out! From the comments: “This film was so groundbreaking for me as far as what horror could be. I’ve returned to it multiple times since i saw it years ago.”

2. Oscar Shortlists are Out! - 15 films in each of the three short film categories have moved on in the race. We cover the announcement on Short of the Week including some off-the-cuff impressions from me, noting an improved Live-Action lineup compared to last year, and questioning whether a 3rd nomination for Don Hertzfeldt will prove to be the charm. 15 of the 45 are available for free streaming, check them out in our Shortverse collection.

3. Reactions and Snubs in the Live-Action Race - Also on Short of the Week, Céline Roustan collects her disparate thoughts on the shortlist, giving congrats to S/W alums, and highlighting some injustices from the Academy.

4. Behind the Scenes of an Oscar Campaign - There isn’t a lot of good writing about what goes into an indie awards campaign so we were pleased to come across this piece in POV Magazine which pulls back the veil. The piece outlines the steps the film team behind the feature documentary, To Kill a Tiger, took on the way to securing a nomination last year.

5. The AI Advances Keep Coming - After the lackluster launch of OpenAI’s Sora last week, this week brought the first look at Google’s Veo 2 model and folks are blown away by the results. Is having YouTube, which other models allegedly scrape to train, simply a game-winner for Google?

6. An “Ethical” AI Video Model? - Bryn Mooser, who was, once upon a time, a Short of the Week featured filmmaker, has since moved into media entrepreneurship— first with the immersive content studio RYOT, then with the documentary production company, XTR. Asteria, an AI Film and Animation studio is his latest venture, and it has partnered with research outfit Moonvalley to jointly own and control a new model that Variety describes as “A “clean” image and video generation model, trained exclusively on “ethically sourced” data.

7. YouTube Introduces Third-Party AI Trainability - While YouTube may be the biggest moat for Google’s own video models, they have made efforts to make the platform available to competitors and are rolling out an opt-in to YouTubers allowing them to consent to having outside companies train on their videos.

8. Runway Launches AI Talent Network - Described by the company as “A new media platform to discover and hire the creatives and companies actively using AI to shape the future of media,” the platform is up now with launch partners that include Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD, where former Indiewire Editor-in-Chief Eric Kohn is a key executive.

9. Sundance Shorts Lineup is Here - Congrats to the film teams behind this year’s 57 Official Selections! We’ll be diving into the lineup over the holiday break and will bring you highlights in the new year. Heads up though—for today and tomorrow only you can get 20% off a short film online pass.

10. Longread: It’s Nice That on Wallace and Gromit - I highly recommend this deep dive with creator and director Nick Park, co-director Merlin Crossingham and supervising animator Will Becher on 35 years of Wallace and Gromit. A beloved franchise, born from shorts, cheers to Aardman on the iconic man and dog duo’s second feature film.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week