Short Films | MostlyFilm

Best Animated Short
by Spank The Monkey

About a week and a half ago, I spent a delightful Sunday morning at the Watershed in Bristol, watching a programme of the nominees for this year’s Best Animated Short Oscar. It’s a service provided in cinemas across the globe by the good people at Shorts HD. In preparation for this article, I did a quick check online shortly after the screening, and was delighted to discover that four of the films were viewable for free on YouTube, with the fifth only available via a dodgy streaming site I’d never heard of before.

One week later, three of those four YouTube links were dead. Could this have anything to do with Shorts HD’s plans to make their Oscar programme available for sale on iTunes? Possibly. It just means I’ve had to dig a little harder to find copies of the nominees for you to watch. They’re irritatingly embedded in all sorts of other pages, and I can’t guarantee how long they’ll be around for. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Continue reading Eat My Shorts! →

by Philip Concannon

The occasion of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games taking place in London is not just a sporting event, but also a cultural one. The London 2012 Festival will run throughout the summer and will encompass all of the arts in a series of special performances and exhibitions around the capital, with a collection of new short films by British directors being one of the most intriguing offerings. This London 2012 portmanteau film consists of four new works from Mike Leigh, Asif Kapadia, Lynne Ramsay and Max & Dania (Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini). The brief given to these directors allowed them complete freedom to produce a film that reflected London and the games as they saw it. As with any portmanteau film, London 2012 is a mixed bag, but the finished product certainly is an interesting blend of styles.

Continue reading London 2012 – the Olympic Shorts →