short film

From the guys who brought you "Plot Device," comes Red Giant's latest short film showcasing their latest software. "Spy vs. Guy" was made with the help of Red Giant BulletProof, a delivery solution which they claim saved them a ton of time in post.

Watch "Spy vs. Guy" and a making-of below.

Open Culture writes: To some fans of his not-exactly-a-sitcom Louie, Louis C.K. simply appeared a few years ago, fully formed and acclaimed by his peers as perhaps the most skilled, dedicated comedic craftsmen working today. But he does have a past, stretching back well beyond his voice role on the animated series Home Movies and his direction of the film Pootie Tang, and he has offered up entertaining fragments of it online. Above you’ll find his earliest known short film, Ice Cream. Begin watching this black-and-white meditation on the vagaries of disaffected twentysomething love in the nineties — one which opens in a convenient store, no less — and you’ll immediately think of Kevin Smith’s Clerks. But C.K.

Ellen Gamerman of the Wall Street Journal writes: Even though it won an Academy Award in February, the short documentary "Inocente" likely would have faded into obscurity most years after a quick theatrical run. This spring, however, the 39-minute film, about a homeless teenager who creates fanciful paintings to escape her dismal circumstances, is beating out Disney movies in an extended run on the iTunes short films bestseller list.

Ivan Kander of Short of the Week writes: Today, street artists have essentially become modern day Robin Hoods—swift and nimble rebels who aren’t afraid to stick it to the “man.” They’re the shepherds of counter culture, taking art out of elite museums and giving it back to the people. And, with each stunt their mythoi grow. They become icons, rockstars, even legends.

Danny Lacey's short sci-fi film "That Day," shot by Philip Bloom on the Canon C300, is now available to view in full online.

Says Bloom about the experience, "For my part as DP, I had to decide which camera I was going to shoot this on, how to shoot it, and what I needed to achieve this. I decided upon the C300…why the C300? Well first off it is my newest camera and I really wanted to see it pushed in this situation. I was looking at the F3 which would have worked great, but for me this camera made more sense. Especially as it’s the EF version and there would be some hand-held work. Those IS lenses are a dream for that."

Read his full account of the shoot here on his blog. Watch "That Day" and an extensive making-of below.

The Sartorialist presents the third edition of his Lunch for 25 series. Filmed in beautiful black and white and feauturing 25 of the most sharply dressed men you're likely to see today, it also ends with a mother of a karaoke session.

The Sartorialist has said of his series, "It’s like if all the best dressed guys I know got together for lunch…"

Watch below.

The full 3-minute film that Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola directed for Prada's fragrance Candy L'Eau has been released. The adorable quirkfest is entirely in French (with English subtitles) in direct homage to the film Jules et Jim by way of Anderson/Coppola of course.

Watch below.

Patrick Jean's short film "Motorville" (his follow-up to his 2010 success story "Pixels") uses Google Maps' familiar interface to tell a clever story about oil dependency.

Jean tells Fast Company's Co.Create, "The challenge was simply to animate a modern megalopolis living on a map--like massive, living organisms feeding from oil. But the problem is these organisms are not farsighted enough to achieve their own survival in the long term, because they consume all the resources around them. In the end, modern cities behave more like zombies, robots, or drug addicts. Or a mix of these."

Watch "Motorville" below and read more here.

Zach NeSmith's short film "Versus" was shot on an iPhone 4S and also did not start out its life as a piece of narrative filmmaking. NeSmith filmed bits of his life over a two year period and then used the editing room to craft a fictional story out of the footage.

He tells The Creators Project, "Working this way presented many creative challenges, difficulties and long-awaited solutions. Using my iPhone 4S to film most of the movie, I was able to shoot easily at any time in any place and had culminated days of footage by the time editing and plot development began.”

Watch "Versus" below and read more here.

Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola are directing a series of short films for Prada fragrance Candy L'Eau. The three-episode series is based on the French New Wave classic Jules et Jim and tells the story of a girl named Candy caught in a fashionable and quirky (come on, it's Wes Anderson) love triangle.

Watch the first episode below.

Robert Rodriguez has teamed up with Blackberry to crowdsource parts of his branded short film "Two Scoops." Rodriguez filmed the short with certain pieces missing and is giving fans a chance to fill in those holes.

He explains, "People are constantly writing me on Twitter, saying, Put me in your movie! Now they can! We have a whole blank screen waiting for them....[When I'm collaborating on a feature film] I give them a sense of what I want--a huge monster--then they go and design it. They run it by me and I give them notes. [With this project] I would say, 'Yours is one of the finalists; I love what you did here but now I want you to give me, say, three heads instead of two.' I’m going to respond to whatever they send me. That’s what’s so fun. You take what people bring to you and figure out how to make it work."

Director Guillermo Arriaga and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, ASC, collaborated to shoot a “beautiful horror movie” entirely with Nikon D800 DSLR cameras. Arriaga, screenwriter of Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, wrote and directed “Broken Night,” a tense and unsettling short film. On an empty stretch of desert road after a car crash, a mother and her young daughter find that the accident is the least of their troubles.

Actor Domnhall Gleeson (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, True Grit) steps behind the cameras and directs his father Brendan and brother Brian in the dark comedy short "Noreen."

The 18-minute film focuses on two bumbling Irish cops (one hearbroken over the titular Noreen) as they bungle up a seemingly routine investigation. Watch below.

The minute-long trailer found below could very well be the teaser for a summer blockbuster, judging by the seemingly action-packed narrative and its star power. Instead, it's a teaser for Jaguar's upcoming 15-minute branded short film titled "Desire." It stars Damian Lewis and Shannyn Sossamon and is produced by Ridley Scott's RSA Film.

Watch the teaser below.

Danny Lacey's short film "Host" is now available to view online. It has the distinction of being the first narrative that Philip Bloom shot on the RED Epic and was made for about $500.

Watch it below and read more production notes from Lacey and Bloom here on Bloom's blog.

Filmmaker Chris R. Wilson collaborated with a computer to make the short film "Do You Love Me?" (titled by the computer). Wilson initiated a conversation with Cleverbot, touted as the world's most advanced artificial intelligence app, to create the hilarious, unintentionally absurdist short film.

Watch it below and definitely read the transcript of Wilson's conversation with Cleverbot here (in the video's description) to see exactly how the scriptwriting unfolded.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Bart Hess turns a red heart into a sensual object with the help of two enormous latex balloons fitted around two models' heads. Says Hess of the short, "I want to create a tension between the body and material—almost as though they become one."

Watch below and read more here on NOWNESS.

Lovefest: Heart to Mouth on Nowness.com.

If Willy Wonka ran an amusement park, Till Nowak's mockumentary "The Centirifuge Brain Project" might be what it would look like. The award-winning short film uses impressive visual effects created by Nowak to show its impossible rides. It's now available to watch in full online. Check it out below.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone talks to Fast Company's Co.Create about what it was like to turn 91 photographs into a short film for Canon's Project Imaginat10n.

He says of the similarities between filmmaking and running a startup, "It’s similar in that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; everyone is doing one little thing. One person is creating the tiny figurine for my model, another is selecting lenses, there’s one technical team and one artistic team and [just like at Twitter or any of his startups] everything comes together to create one unified product that people will hopefully enjoy."

See the images Stone chose and read more here.

Disney's epically charming short animated film "Paperman," nominated for an Oscar this year, is now available to view in full online. The beautiful retro film, which is dialogue-free and filmed almost entirely in black and white, uses an innovative combination of hand-drawn animation and CGI.

Explains Wired, "'Paperman'‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that [director John] Kahrs described as 'just like painting on the surface of the CG.'"

Watch "Paperman" below and read more here.

Harken back to the days of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as Wired profiles how Derek Van Gorder and Otto Stockmeier made the short sci-fi film "C 299,792 km/s" with only $40,000 (raised on Kickstarter) and no digital effects. Explains Stockmeier, "Digital technology has made basic filmmaking tools available to everyone, but undertaking a project like this is still considered way outside of the indie filmmaking spectrum. What we hoped to achieve with combining practical effects and digital equipment is to show that with a little ingenuity people can make really cool movies with very little resources."

Watch the film below and read the full story here.

Writer/director Alexis Kirke is taking choose-your-own-adventure filmmaking to the next level. His short film, "Many Worlds," has four different endings that will be determined based on the audience's physical response to the film. Several members of the audience will be fitted with sensors that detect their heart rate, brainwave activity, perspiration, or muscle tension. The film branches out at certain points and will take a path depending on how tense or calm the audience members are registering.

Explains The Verge, "So long as you can get on board with a found-footage thriller about a high-school science chestnut, the conceit is fairly interesting: if an audience gets bored during a slow section, the next segment will speed up; if they're 'too happy,' the next section might be meant to depress them."

To kick off the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, which started yesterday, Sundance has once again teamed up with YouTube to bring a selection of its short films to the masses. 12 of the 65 short films that are screening at the festival are available to view now on YouTube's Screening Room channel.

Watch them here.

One of the Academy Awards' five nominees for Animated Short Film is available for viewing online. See the clever "Fresh Guacomole" along with the trailers for the four other nominees ("Adam and Dog," "Head Over Heels," "The Longest Daycare," and "Paperman") below. (via Short of the Week)

Filmmaker Frédéric Guelaff profiles celebrated chef Yannick Alléno as he attempts to reinterpret modern cusine with his new restaurant, 1947. Says Alléno, "I am just thinking about what modern cuisine should be. Everything is put into question and thought of in a new way.”

Watch below and read more here on NOWNESS.

Yannick Alléno: The French Revolution on Nowness.com.