Pages tagged “salute your shorts”

Salute Your Shorts: ShortsLab

By Sean Gandert at 12:01 PM on July 8, 2011

Since the beginning of Salute Your Shorts, one of the primary reasons for this column has been to support the creation and appreciation of short films. You wouldn’t necessarily think that this would be necessary, but short films, while much more easily accessible due to YouTube and the nigh-infinite other streaming video services, remain critically neglected and weirdly ghettoized. For some reason there’s an assumption that if a movie is 70 minutes long it’s worth $10 of your money to see in theaters while if it’s 45 minutes long it isn’t even worth your time.... read more

Found in: Movies, Features

Salute Your Shorts: 2011 Oscar-nominated Documentaries

By Sean Gandert at 2:10 PM on February 25, 2011

For the first time ever, this year the films nominated for the Academy Awards’ short documentary prize are publicly available. It’s not a surprise that the category’s long been so neglected, since both short films and documentaries have always been fairly ghettoized. There’s also perhaps a bigger issue with the category’s restraints here than with live action and animated shorts. While those shorts are in fact made for festivals, most of the best documentaries made in any given year are produced in order to be sold to television, and television shows are disqualified from the category.... read more

Found in: Movies, Features

Salute Your Shorts: 2011 Oscar-nominated Animated Films

By Sean Gandert at 4:25 PM on February 23, 2011

Most years the animated shorts category is both the audience’s preference and the only one of the categories that seems to really bring in great films. It’s hard to explain this disparity, except perhaps that because so many animated shorts are comedies they tend to lack the pretension of live-action and documentary shorts. They’re also frequently more stylistically ambitious than the other categories, which are frequently more conservative examples of their genres. I wouldn’t call the nominees examples of avant-garde cinema by any means, but they’re definitely a lot closer than what you’ll see pretty much anywhere else at the... read more

Found in: Movies, Features

Salute Your Shorts: 2011 Oscar-nominated Live Action films

By Sean Gandert at 12:00 PM on February 21, 2011

For the sixth year, Shorts International is releasing the Oscar-nominated short films into theaters, but for the first time, this includes documentary shorts in addition to animated and live-action. Here's our take on this year's contenders. read more

Found in: Movies, Features