Most of this year’s live action shorts are screening in selected cinemas across the world now and will be available on iTunes Stores in 54 countries across the globe beginning February 21st.
This is a combination of a film festival and awards ceremony designed to showcase the best in original online video and judges this year include director Edgar Wright, actor James Franco and Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood.
Along with YouTube, the site has proved a valuable outlet for filmmakers of all ages and levels from around the world.
Director of the Vimeo Festival + Awards, Jeremy Boxer recently said:
“The aim of the Vimeo Festival + Awards is to become the gold standard for creative online video. We designed the program to focus on discovering the best new talent and to give that talent a platform that will catapult their careers to the next level. We are proud to reveal our new panel of esteemed judges.”
Submissions are not limited to works that have appeared on Vimeo but the original content must have either premiered online or have been created between July 31, 2010 and February 20th 2012.
Vimeo have said that winners in each category will get a $5,000 grant to make a new film.
The overall winner gets an additional $25,000 grant.
Complete rules and restrictions are available at Vimeo’s award site, so be sure to check them out here.
If you haven’t entered already, submissions close on February 20th, 2012.
The term comes from the French director’s Be Kind Rewind (2008) where video store workers (Jack Black and Mos Def) remake films on the cheap or ‘swede‘ them.
In the film the tapes are described as being shipped from Sweden as an excuse to charge higher rental fees and longer wait times.
As part of the marketing campaign for Gondry did a sweded version of the actual movie and now he’s done this version of Scorsese’s classic of urban alienation.
I especially like how he’s done the ‘You talkin’ to me?’ speech.
For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence.
Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
This short film by Andrew Clancy eloquently documents a year in New York.
Sometimes it is difficult to precisely say why a combination of images and music works, but I think this effectively captures a time and place.
Amongst the familiar imagery of the Big Apple (the Empire State building, Times Square, Central Park) are more surprising shots: Uruguay fans watching the World Cup and a Bond film showing outside in the park.
Move is a short film by Rick Mereki that executes a simple idea brilliantly.
Along with his DOP and producer Tim White, he filmed Andrew Lees in various locations across the world for three shorts: Move, Eat and Learn.
Move is my favourite, as it uses the power of editing and framing to depict global travel in just 1 minute.
As Rick says on his Vimeo page:
3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films = a trip of a lifetime.
Earlier this month he visited the area, a mountain which is one of the prime locations in the world to view the stars.
The Teide Observatories have been there since 1964 and host various telescopes from around the world due to the optimal astronomical viewing conditions.
In this short film Sorgjerd captures the Milky Way galaxy, the mountains of the region and even a sandstorm in the Sahara desert backlit by Grand Canaria.
A British film maker based in Cairo for the past 12 years, he filmed some of the protests with a GoPro and the Canon 550D.
He says:
As a foreign guest living in Egypt I generally try to steer clear of Egyptian politics. However, what has been happening in Tahrir is totally unprecedented. It’s amazing to see people making signs from anything lying around them in an attempt to get their voices heard
If any news organisations are reading this you can contact him via his website here.
The project was crowd-sourced as several shorts, or chapters, and then combined into this 38-minute final version, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival a couple of weeks ago:
Mike Randolph recently shot this film showing the tradition of human towers in Catalonia.
In Tarragona in Spain people gather every two years to build human castles (or ‘castells’), a Catalan tradition which originated in the local area around the end of the 18th century.
The sight of humans supporting each other, along with the vibrant colors inside the stadium, make for compelling viewing.
A short film which depicts a futuristic cinema experience has already attracted the attention of Hollywood.
37-year old Scottish art director Ben Craig put it together with the help of DOP Richard Mountney and finished it by using software packages such as After Effects and Carrara.
Since it was posted online in December it has caused quite a bit of buzz and led to interest from studios and agents in LA.
A short film by Andrew Wonder provides a fascinating glimpse of hidden areas in New York City.
Undercity follows urban historian Steve Duncan as he ventures underground to subway stations, sewers, tunnels where the homeless live and the Williamsburg Bridge.
Shot on a Canon 5D MKII in a raw, handheld style it is surprisngly tense, mainly down to the fact that much of the filming was illicit.
Not only does it look professional, but it has an exciting climax with some stunning shots of the Manhattan skyline.
Known for his short films and film festival reports, he went out into a snow covered New York and shot a homage to the 1929 short “Man With a Movie Camera“.
“This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject. Any professional will tell you the talent exhibited here is extraordinary.”
Written and directed by H5/ François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, it tells a story entirely through the use contemporary and historical logos and mascots.
Director Anton Corbijn has made the world’s “smallest and shortest film” for the Dutch postal service TNT, from an idea by creative agency KesselsKramer.
The above short film The Third & The Seventh by Alex Roman is an incredible example of CGI animation. So good in fact, that it doesn’t on first glance look as though it was entirely created on a computer.
It deals with architecture and photography and the following video explains how it was done:
This video also shows how they did a certain shot:
It not only shows how far visual effects have come but also how cheap the tools are to create something that looks stunning.
YouTube announced last month that they are creating a online resource for filmmakers called The Screening Room.
Check out this promo video:
The idea is that it will be a new platform that will enable independent filmmakers to a wider global audience.
Although the video sharing site already contains a lot of user generated content, this is a new dedicated section that also makes more authored short films to stand out.
Filmmakers can opt for their films to have a ‘Buy Now’ option next to their work for DVD or digital sales and they can then share in the majority of ad revenue generated from views.
To submit you just send and an email with information about your film to [email protected] (although you have to make sure that you own all the digital rights to the work you are submitting).
Each week, four new films will be selected by an editorial panel and then uploaded and highlighted in the Screening Room section.
“Hopefully as they see thousands of people watching their films, it’s going to be a very eye-opening experience,” said Sara Pollack, YouTube’s film and animation manager.
Among the first eight titles to be showcased are “Love and War,” a stop-motion puppet movie by a Swedish director; the Oscar-nominated short “I Met The Walrus,” about an interview with John Lennon; and “Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?” by performance artist Miranda July.
YouTube said people whose clips regularly attract a million viewers can make several thousand dollars a month. The bigger prize can be exposure.
When YouTube featured the nine-minute short “Spider” by Nash Edgerton in February, it became the fifth-best selling short on iTunes, Pollack said.
The creators of the full-length feature “Four Eyed Monsters,” Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, got their break when more than a million YouTube views helped land them a TV and DVD distribution deal, she said.
“They ended up doing really, really well, ironically by putting their film online for free,” Pollack said.
Although, directors can already upload to sites like MySpace and YouTube, this new section appears to be more filmmaker friendly and makes it easier for quality shorts to get exposure outside the usual avenue of festivals and late night TV slots.
Some of the most recent examples to be showcased are:
Love and War: A stop-motion ‘animated opera’ by Swedish director Frederick Emilson
I Met The Walrus: The Oscar-nominated short about an interview with John Lennon
I recently came across a Radio 4 show (via the excellent Speechification) about these bizarre and unintentionally hilarious films.
Check out Telly Savalas Looks at Birmingham, England:
Known as ‘quota quickies’, they were a product of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 which meant that short films – or supporting features as they were known back then – were subsidised by the government to offset the dominance of the Hollywood main features.
They were made by director Harold Baim who managed to persuade Savalas via his agent – Dennis Selinger of ICM – to provide the voice for these travelogues.
What makes it even funnier is that Savalas never even visited the locations he is waxing lyrical about.
Perfect to Begin (Directed by Richard Lawson and produced by Tina Gharavi): A drama about a couple who go on a holiday that soon descends into a mess.
Cocoon (Directed by Hana Tsutsumi and produced by Daniel Silber): A drama about a young child trapped in an apartment with body of his dead mother and the post man who delivers letters to the building.
Signals (Directed by Anders Habenicht and produced by Joel Burman): A dark tale of a girl attacked and raped in a Swedish park and another girl who finds a mobile near the crime scene.
The Amazing Trousers (Directed by William F Clark and produced by Andy Kemble and Jason Delahunty): A comic tale set in Edwardian England about a pair of red trousers that transform the life of a man who wears them.
All of the films were of a good standard but the three stand outs for me were: A Bout De Truffe, which was highly inventive, well acted and very funny; Signals, which was disturbing but had an innovative narrative twist; and Always Crashing in the Same Car, which was notable for its widescreen lensing and the reuniting of Richard E Grant and Paul McGann for the first time since Withnail and I.
But if any of the organisers are reading this, how about putting the entries online next year and taking a public vote as well as the one from the selected judges?