If you don't believe that the short film has increased in popularity in recent years, consider Exhibit A: Lazy Sunday. Debuting on Saturday Night Live Dec. 17, 2005, the "SNL Digital Short" starred Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg as dopey rappers who get a little help from their friends C.S. Lewis and Manhattan's Magnolia Bakery. After its airing, Lazy Sunday became a viral-video phenomenon, a hit on iTunes and YouTube. It was reportedly viewed on the latter about 5 million times before NBC requested its removal (it was subsequently resurrected on NBC's site).
Still not convinced? Here's Exhibit B: John Polson's Tropfest. The yearly event began in 1993 when actor-director Polson asked owners of the Tropicana Café in Sydney, Australia, if they would set aside an evening to show his short film there (Polson had used the Tropicana as a shooting location). Two hundred people showed up for the screening. Polson then decided to create a yearly short-film contest, and now about 150,000 people watch the Tropfest proceedings each February, either live or via satellite. "It's a rock concert now for short films," Polson says.
When the director achieved success through helming features in America, he told his Hide and Seek star Robert De Niro about the contest, and this year Tropfest became part of New York's Tribeca Film Festival (www.tribecafilm festival.org). To try to avoid inclement weather for the outdoor screenings, Tropfest@Tribeca is now becoming a standalone, early-autumn event. The next installment is set for Sept. 23 at the World Financial Center Plaza; cash prize for the winning short is $10,000.
So now you want expert testimony on the short-film explosion? The defense calls Sharon Badal, who teaches at New York University's film school and also serves as programmer for short films at the Tribeca Film Festival. She has written a book, Swimming Upstream: A Lifesaving Guide to Short Film Distribution, to be published by Focal Press later this year. "The short film was always looked on as kind of the poor man's feature film and basically looked at as a way to get a feature made," she says. "And I think what has really changed over the past five years is that, because of the new technology and the new platforms that are available—like mobile, like Internet—the short-film format is finally being recognized as its own art form and suitable for the new technology. In fact, it's more suitable even than some feature projects."
Polson agrees, arguing that the public no longer sees short films as "arty" and "esoteric" or as something only film school students think about. Short films do not require as much time investment from audiences and, Polson says, "For better or worse, people's attention spans are getting shorter." Still, he too cites technological advances as a chief reason for increased interest in shorts.
In addition to providing new media platforms for films, technology has made things easier on the production end. Digital cameras and computer-editing programs have made the creative process more affordable, as well as more accessible to beginners who have not had the benefits of film school. Also, today's technology makes it easier for artists to get their projects to festivals, as Michelangelo Alasa, who runs the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival (www.nycdowntownshorts.blogspot.com), points out. Alasa cites Withoutabox.com, an online submission service that helps remind filmmakers of deadlines and other considerations. "I think the proliferation of film festivals has happened mostly through Withoutabox," he says. "It's just so much easier—an effective way to put presenters and filmmakers together."
But just because you have access to the technology doesn't necessarily mean you're a good filmmaker, notes Badal, who viewed 1,500 of the 2,300 shorts submitted to this year's Tribeca festival. Obviously, not every submission is a gem. Still, making short films is a way for people to experiment and discover where their talents lie, she says. As far as fictional narrative films are concerned, she says she sees no particular trends in subject matter for shorts these days, although political films and films about war continue to arrive in large numbers. And comedy remains big. "You are always going to have what I call the 'joke short,' " she says. "You know, the one that has a punch line to it, the one that is short and sweet and snappy. And those are great for some of the new technology outlets. But people have a misconception. For example, everybody thinks iTunes and they think, 'Oh, under five minutes.' No, no. In fact, it's just the opposite. iTunes is looking for longer pieces"—up to 25 minutes in length.
With all these new tech outlets available, is it even necessary to enter competitions on the festival circuit these days? Badal says it depends on what your goal is. If you simply want to "get more eyeballs on your work," then posting your short on the Internet is a good option. She cautions, however, that if you do this, it will make your work ineligible for festivals later down the line. "But that's your choice; that's the fork in the road for the filmmaker," she says.
If you decide to go the festival route, you must determine where to submit among the multitude of events worldwide. Programmers and filmmakers alike point out that you can spend a lot of money on entry fees if you submit to festivals indiscriminately. The larger, more prestigious festivals—such as Sundance and Tribeca—offer the biggest exposure and usually the biggest prizes for winners. All sorts of portals may swing open if you win an award at such a fest—even if you are accepted merely as a contestant. "If you get into Sundance, you get to put that little olive leaf on all your materials, and it becomes a marketing tool," Badal says.
Larger festivals can become beehives of networking, which can help you find a distribution deal for your short. You can also leverage the attention paid to a short at a festival to get funds to expand the work into a feature—or to make a pitch for an unrelated feature. After all, most filmmakers want to direct features, if only because "full-length" is a more marketable and lucrative game. "You can be the best short-film maker in the world and still be eating cat food," Badal notes.
Festival-specific competitions—such as Polson's Tropfest—are also likely to be found at bigger festivals. But short films can get lost in the shuffle at fests where features predominate. One alternative is to submit your short to an appropriate genre festival—an event specializing in, say, Latino films, horror films, or films of a particular political stripe. Badal says there are vast opportunities for filmmakers who submit to gay and lesbian film festivals. Another tack is to submit to festivals in your geographic area. Programmers may relish the idea of "hometown filmmaker makes good." And some festivals accept submissions only from locals.
Perhaps the biggest boon to filmmakers specializing in shorts is the proliferation of "shorts only" festivals. A couple of the older festivals in this category—Aspen Shortsfest (www.aspen film.org), held in Aspen, Colo., and France's Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival (www.clermont-filmfest.com)—are among the most well-known, but shorts-only festivals of all shapes and sizes have popped up globally during the last 15 or so years.
Robert Arentz, who started out as a self-described "guerrilla-style, shoot-and-run" filmmaker, founded the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival (www.lashortsfest.com) in 1997. About 90 films screened at the first event. In the latest installment, set for September, about 700 shorts will be shown.
Arentz says he feels that shorts-only festivals tend to provide more screening slots and more attention to individual filmmakers than do general festivals. Some bigger festivals will program a short before the screening of a feature, he notes, but because the feature is always the main event, only shorts of a few minutes' duration are apt to be chosen for such pairings. Unlike some shorts-only festivals that restrict submissions to films under 40 minutes—the standard set by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Oscar consideration—the LA Shorts Fest accepts films that run as long as an hour.
Short films, Arentz says, tend to be screened at odd hours at feature-and-shorts events. "It's not gonna be your prime-time slots," he says. "So do you want to play at 11 o'clock Sunday or Saturday morning?" He continues, "But look, if you have an opportunity to screen at one of the marquee festivals, obviously you do it."
LA Shorts Fest screens films in seven categories and includes a "creative commercial" competition that features spots solicited from ad agencies worldwide. About 250 of the 700 accepted films are grouped in a noncompetitive filmmakers' showcase, restricted to artists living in the Los Angeles area. Many of the films in the festival have impressive production values and are cast with name actors. But Arentz has a soft spot for talented beginners. He says, "We always have films that are creative and original but have basically no budget. Those, to me, are the films that are most inspiring. A very young kid that goes out and shoots something—you can see that it wasn't expensive to do. But there's something about it that just captivates you and pulls you in."
Not far from LA Shorts Fest is the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films (www.psfilmfest.org), an offshoot of the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The spinoff will celebrate its 13th anniversary this month. In 2006, festival director Darryl Macdonald says, about 350 short films were shown in the festival proper, with another 2,200 highlighted in the festival's Film Market, a three-day cinematic bazaar that includes panels and seminars and facilitates meetings between artists and industry. According to Macdonald, Film Market affords filmmakers "valuable face time to discuss future projects and make pitches."
"The feature film festival has lots of stars and glamour, with tons of great parties and so on. But the staff enjoys working on Shorts Fest a whole lot more," Macdonald says. "There's this palpable sense of constant, ongoing excitement that, I believe, stems from a sense of discovery." At bigger, feature-focused festivals, he continues, critics and other members of the press pay little attention to unknown quantities, including shorts: "They would in many cases rather pan a film by a major filmmaker with stars than cross the street and take a chance on seeing something they know nothing about. And that, to me, goes against the grain of what festivals are all about to begin with."
If you are a filmmaker who wants a particularly intimate festival experience, you might consider some of the smaller, less-well-known shorts fests that are cropping up these days.
Four years ago Lower Manhattan's Duo Theatre—a live-event company featuring work by Latino theatre artists—was looking for a way to get revenue on dark nights in its theatre space. Explains Alasa, the company's artistic director, "One of our directors was really into film and suggested a short-film festival." The NYC Downtown Short Film Festival was born.
The event has grown rapidly and now consists of screenings of five shorts per night, over a series of three nights each month. Staffers and audience members vote on the top films, which then go into the weeklong main festival, held in spring—at about the same time as the Tribeca festival. "We are filling a gap," Alasa says. "People who may not get into Tribeca will send to us." And for audience members who don't manage to obtain those high-demand tickets for Tribeca screenings, the Duo events provide a cost-friendly alternative.
Alasa notes that the festival receives submissions in a variety of genres, including many "art" films, which it greatly values: "We show films that are just made for the pure pleasure of making a short film and creating a visual that's stunning—perhaps not a narrative, but something that evokes an emotion or a thought or a feeling."
For filmmakers who enjoy working with the short and snappy format, there are events such as the Chicago Short Comedy Video and Film Festival (www.witsendshorts.com), which limits its submissions in a number of ways: To participate, you must live in the Chicago area, and your film must be comedic in nature and no longer than 10 minutes. The festival also has a TV-pilot competition.
Says producer and festival co-founder Marion Sours, " 'Brevity is the soul of wit' is a well-known quote from Shakespeare; perhaps not so well-known is something similar said by Voltaire: 'The way to be a bore is to say everything.' We had one comedy film that condensed a girl's 24-hour day into five seconds. It really got the applause."
Perhaps the best info on festivals comes from the artists whose short films have played on the circuit. Justin Lutsky was a student at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., when he made the 27-minute action comedy Bon Appetit. He submitted it to approximately 45 festivals and was accepted to about half, including LA Shorts Fest. He claims to have had a satisfactory or better experience at most festival screenings he attended. Lutsky also was a contestant on Fox's filmmaker-competition reality show On the Lot, where he made the first cut and appeared on two episodes. He notes the smaller festivals seem to offer a more personal touch: "People know who you are when you get there [and] make an effort to make you feel welcome." He singles out the Bumbershoot arts festival (www.bumbershoot.org) in Seattle as a particularly worthwhile experience—one that provided him with a packed, appreciative audience.
New Zealand native Silvana Jakich, now based in New York, made the 12-and-a-half-minute The Rehearsal, starring Blanche Baker and notorious Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy. She later expanded the short into Underdogs, a "vignette feature" about actors working in New York. Jakich was selective when shopping for festivals, for her short and her feature, submitting the short to only about 15. It was accepted at a few, including NYC Downtown and the Anchorage International Film Festival (www.anchoragefilmfestival.com). Jakich says the most valuable thing festivals offer is audience response. She has even re-edited sequences based on such feedback. "That, for me, is the most interesting thing. I'm not really big on the whole film-festival schmooze."
Although festivals have been helpful in getting Jakich's work front and center, she also looks for other, out-of-the-box ways to augment interest. She recalls, for instance, distributing copies of the feature for use in gift bags at a corporate function. "I unloaded a couple of hundred copies into these bags and left my number," she says, noting that she later received a few calls from potential investors. "I think it's a useful thing to do—to try to find places where you're gonna get people who have possible financing possibilities for you. A festival is one thing, but if you can get into some kind of corporate hands...that's also useful. You never know where the funding's going to come from for the next one."