Week 4 Tutespark

Week 4 – Tutespark

Week fours Tutespark was an interesting one, find 3 short films that were made for internet distribution. I found myself constantly getting distracted, trawling through the hundreds of short films all over the internet. As we discussed in the lecture, the internet may not be a good thing at present for commercial feature length films, but it seems to be doing big things in the world of short film.
I spent hours upon hours looking through some of what’s out there for audiences to watch. Some of it fantastic, moving or heart wrenching dramas. I found some of the most confusing art-house productions i’ve ever seen. Some short films that forced me to think or to feel, others made me laugh with joy, or laugh in disgust at the poor acting and cinematography. I decided to post three short films that all do, and mean different things for the viewer and represents different parts of the online, short film genre.
The first one I decided to share was quite simply marvellous. A simple pleasure to view, well produced and executed:

Pretty damn cool huh? In this instance the internet has been used as a platform to showcase someone’s fantastic filmmaking skills and thus improves the art and craft of cinema – The internet is starting to look like a positive tool... for now.

Then I can across another one - Quite different to the last. A French movie with subtitles usually has positive connotations, but this was absolutely awful. It seems a bunch of armatures, who know very little, if anything about cinema woke up one morning and said ‘I know, today I will make a short film’ then threw some special effects in for good measure. I don’t recommend you waste your time actually watching the whole thing. The first 30 seconds is sufficed to let you know that you just wasted 30 seconds of your life.

So we have established there are some great shorts out there, and plenty of crap, irrelevant rubbish. But the most important type of short film, in my opinion, are those which communicate an important message to the viewer. I found plenty out there advocating for homelessness, addiction sufferes, the war-torn and many more. They used various techniques to make the audience sensitive to the issue raised and helped me view many subjects from an angle i may not have considered before today. The one I chose to share i don’t particularly like. It made me feel kind of sick and disturbed, but that’s precisely what made it so effective. It’s called ‘The Black Dogs Progress’ and is described on it’s website as ‘Tragic story of a dog's trail through abusive owners told through a series of cascading flip books’

Interesting isn’t it. The unusual format of this movie as well as the shocking subject matter helps to draw the audience in and keep them watching until the end. It makes me want to run down to RSPCA and adopt every single dog there so that they won’t fall into the hands of an abusive owner. There are stacks of great short films on the web, giving artists with something important to say a platform to speak their piece.
The internet is a massive tool, and in the world of short film, a fantastic one. We have been bombarded with rubbish, like that from our French friends in the second movie, but at the same time we are given masterpieces like the first and last film. And that, i believe, makes all the crap worth it