Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Spike Jonze Directs a Glitzy 30min Short for Gucci - The year of brand films rolls on. Enjoy Jonze returning to short film with The Tiger, which sees the auteur team up with Babygirl director Halina Reijn. The pair orchestrate a constellation of movie stars like Demi Moore, Ed Harris, and Keke Palmer, in this narrative complement to Denma’s debut collection as Gucci’s new artistic director.

2. Meta Launches “Vibes” for Short Form AI Video - Announced yesterday, this refresh of the flagship Meta AI app now opens on a new community video feed of AI-generated video. TechCrunch is representative of most of the coverage, which decries the force-feeding of “AI Slop”. But, influential voices like tech analyst Ben Thompson are impressed, declaring it “awesome” in a podcast yesterday. Being value-neutral about whether it is “good” or “bad”, I suspect this will be a big deal and will aim to articulate my reasoning soon.

3. More Meta News: The Debut of “Enhanced Cinema” - Meta had their Connect 2025 event last week, and amid new hardware, I was intrigued by this partnership with Blumhouse. Enhanced Cinema brings contemporary feature films to headsets in a new format that expands effects outside the 2D frame, and some fans are excited. James Cameron was on stage too, and the one-time resurrector of 3d movies is bullish on cinema for headsets as he explains in this interview for Lowpass (free, but sign-up required).

4. Search Millions of Videos Used To Train Generative AI - The Atlantic Magazine has a new tool that allows you to search a database of YouTube videos and see what generative AI models have ingested them for training (if you click the link, it looks like you get stopped by the paywall, but don’t worry, you can still type in the search box and return results).
   
   Well, look at that—412 Short of the Week videos in the Runway Gen-3 dataset. We certainly didn’t approve that! We’re hardly unique, though—every major channel pops up in these datasets. The wild west of AI training may soon be behind us, with Midjourney being sued by Disney, and the recent $1.5B decision against Anthropic, but we now have some transparency of how big the data grab was.

5. Lionsgate and Runway Partnership Stalls - Part of why YouTube was pillaged by AI model designers is that bespoke training sets aren’t proving adequate, as this report in The Wrap indicates. Money quote, “The Lionsgate catalog is too small to create a model,” said a person familiar with the situation. “In fact, the Disney catalog is too small to create a model.”

6. Animators Worldwide Unite for To Gaza With Love Anijam - Inspired by the work of Haneen Koraz who runs animation workshops for kids in Gaza, and spearheaded by legendary animator Joanna Quinn, who recently used her Lifetime Achievement Award speech at Annecy to highlight the work of Koraz, To Gaza With Love is a community animation project of impressive scale, with over 300 animators worldwide contributing. You can view individual films above in a 3-hour loop, via an interactive map, or a giant YouTube playlist. Learn more about the project and its genesis in Cartoon Brew.

7. 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2025 - The latest edition of the venerable Filmmaker Magazine talent list is out, with lots of individuals from the short film world highlighted. Kudos to Scott Macaulay and team on his final edition of the series before he steps down as Editor-in-Chief of the magazine he co-founded. Hopefully, his successor continues the tradition, and maybe that person is you? Gotham just publicly posted the position.

8. RIP Diane Martel - A legendary New York City Music Video figure, Martel came of age alongside the city’s Hip-Hop scene. This 1992 doc short of hers is an underground classic, and the director rose to become one of the music industry’s preeminent directors. 2013 was a defining moment as she gave the culture not one, but two zeitgeist-defining works with Miley Cyrus’ ‘We Can’t Stop’ and ‘Blurred Lines’, the controversial video that birthed Emily Ratajkowski’s stardom. Rolling Stone published a good obit, and you can find an incomplete, but still extensive, list of her videos at IMVDB with links to watch.

9. Vimeo’s Long Goodbye - The Bending Spoons acquisition of Vimeo, which we touched upon in our last newsletter, may ultimately prove good for the platform. But, it still feels like a bitter ending of some kind. I you want to DEEP dive into the story, I just discovered this article from my former colleague on the Vimeo curation team, Doug Klinger, which goes long on the context surrounding key decisions made by the company’s leadership over the years, in the most full accounting of the Vimeo journey I’ve seen yet.

10. What To Watch in Theaters - Go see Predators, this year’s feature doc sensation out of Sundance. MTV Documentary Films opened the film in LA, SF, and NYC this weekend, with plans to go nationwide next week.

    
    Directed by David Osit, the S/W alum connection is a little fudged this time, as we’re highlighting its producer who has never technically been featured on the site in Kellen Quinn. Pertinent to our hearts, though, Kellen is something better than a producer—he is a curator! We had the pleasure of working with Kellen in the 2010s as he built the short documentary department of the science magazine, Aeon, and he kept that keen eye for talent after moving into producing, helping Garrett Bradley transform her short, Alone, into critic David Erlich’s best film of 2020, and then receiving an Oscar nomination last year for Sugar Cane. 
    
    The story of the rise and fall of the network television show, To Catch a Predator, the film is a “chilling, surprising exploration of the show, and the world it helped create.” Check out the trailer below.

Spotlight on Encounters

We’re psyched to have the preeminent UK short film festival back after funding issues caused the cancellation of the 2024 edition. Rob is on the ground taking in the fest and meeting with filmmakers, but before he left, he put together the above coverage for us, which includes:

• A link to the full film selection.

• A Shortverse Collection highlighting fresh films from S/W alums.

• A playlist of selected shorts available to watch now at home.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week