Wait One Doc-gone Minute

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Paying Attention To

1. Nominees for Cinema Eye Honors Announced - The awards for the documentary community, by the documentary community, release their nominees. It’s a strong showing for alum Elizabeth Lo who gets noms for directing, producing, and cinematography. 11 short film semifinalists need to be whittled down, which will happen after screenings in NYC and LA in early December. Here’s a Shortverse collection of those films in contention.

2. How Streaming Elevated (and Ruined) Documentaries - In the background of documentary award season is a general pessimism within the community. After experiencing unprecedented growth in critical and mainstream attention in the 2010s and early pandemic, the genre is perceived to be in a bit of a rut, artistically and financially. The substack blog, Stat Significant, takes an interesting, data-supported, stab at what they think has gone wrong.

3. How to Pitch to NyTimes Op/Docs - I had the pleasure of taking a meeting with Christine Kecher and Yvonne Ashley Kouadjo of NyTimes Op/Docs recently and they are definitely interested in learning more about short documentary projects in the pre-production through rough cut stages. Video Consortium features Kecher in the latest episode of their “The Pitch” series describing what they are looking for and how to get your project in front of them.

4. Duncan Cowles Featured in The Guardian - Rounding out our documentary intro to this newsletter is a terrific and brave profile of multi-time alum Duncan Cowles in advance of the Nov 19th UK release of his debut feature, Silent Men. Whether Duncan is even a documentarian is an open question, he’s more of a video essayist in my impression, but whatever the classification he is one of the more inimitable creators out there. Catherine Bray conducts the interview which delves into the Scottish creator’s idiosyncracies and emotional repressions.

5. Directors Library Sports a Spiffy Redesign - Our fellow web video curators have a new website to showcase their work. The site maintains the clean minimalism they are known for but includes several new collection and curatorial on-ramps to individual videos.

6.  Highest-Grossing Short Films(?) - This piece is really funny to me. I caught it via a Google Alert from an outlet called CEOWorld and it’s a list that purports to rank the highest-grossing short films of all time. What criteria, in what territories? Doesn’t say. In fact, none of these are actually short films! AI probably put this together, but what the list actually does is equally interesting, which is list box office amounts for short-to-feature adaptations. It’s a pretty knowledgeable list in that regard, capturing a bunch of features with title changes from their shorts. Their AI probably copied our massive Letterboxd list. 😝

7. Wes Ball’s “Raw Cut” Comes to Streaming - Talked about this before, but the “raw cut” of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now on Disney+ and Hulu. I watched it last night and it’s just really cool—a split screen view, the finished film plays on top while the bottom screen plays a mix of production or pre-production elements, like storyboards or animatics during animated action sequences, and footage of the actors in mocap suits during the closeups. For those who want to see what modern movie-making looks like it’s an invaluable resource.

8. Taika Waititi Directs Disney Christmas Short - A 4min piece titled The Boy and the Octopus has been a big hit online, racking up 4M views in just a couple of days. It’s cute and sweet and rather forgettable all in all. Much more looking forward to Lowery’s An Almost Christmas which debuts today on Disney+.

9. Apple Unveils Final Cut Pro 11 - If you’re under 30 you may not remember it, but Final Cut Pro was, once upon a time, poised to dominate the non-linear editing software market. Then, a massive redesign in 2011 with Final Cut Pro X was poorly received, and as Premiere and DaVinci Resolve rose, Apple seemed to ignore its Pro software tools. We’re still awaiting impressions, but will FCP 11 change that?

10. Can Chick-Fil-A Really Be an Entertainment Destination? - I’ve mentioned my curiosity around brand films in the past, and one of the big new bets on a potential branded content universe is coming next week when Chick-fil-A debuts its “Play” app. Fast Company has an in-depth look into the what and why of this seemingly quixotic venture that has birthed several CG short films, including the one below with over 30M YouTube views.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week