Bring Out the Shorts! By Rosalie Leung That’s a wrap! This year’s Short Shorts Film Festival recently finished up its second annual run at LA’s Egyptian Theatre. The festival, which ran in LA from April 30th through May 1st, was formerly known as “American Short Shorts” and originally based in Japan. Its very first screenings took place in Tokyo, Naha, and Okinawa, Japan in 1999 with its main focus on filmmakers from the U.S. Now, five years later, the festival has minimized its title to “Short Shorts” and expanded its outlook to include screenings in other countries as well as shorts from international filmmakers all across the globe. This year, the screening in the U.S. was a two-day event with nearly twice as many shorts showing than the previous year. While the festival included shorts from filmmakers as far as Australia and as close as our very own UCLA, in keeping with its Japanese heritage, the festival was mostly focused on shorts from Japan. The highlight of the Japanese short films was Koji Yamamura’s Academy Award nominated “Mt. Head”, an animated film about a stingy man who wakes up with a small tree growing on his head after eating some cherry seeds. Yamamura’s short film had both a traditional fairy tale flavor and a modern flair. Another short shown at the festival “Night Out” by Jason Tammemagi, was wildly different in style and tone than Yamamura’s “Mt. Head,” but just as imaginative and entertaining. This short was about two teens who meet at a club and instantly form a connection. By the end of the eight-minute film, the two get together for a romantic night. Tammemagi’s use of realistic and, at the same time, fantasy-like, neon-lit images of people dancing was innovative and dazzling. The replacement of dialogue with rave style, up-beat music was another great idea that made images stand out and the story come to life. Since this year’s screening in LA, many of the participating filmmakers have already received calls from interested big time studios. Co-founder of Short Shorts, Douglas Williams, finds this news encouraging and hopes Short Shorts will help many of the unknown filmmakers featured in the festivals to eventually find their way to the big screen. “Short films are not huge money makers and they’re not going to get the amount distribution filmmakers need to support themselves and their careers, but they are definitely a launching pad or stepping stone, sort of like a visual resume,” says Williams. Helping the little guys out is exactly what Short Shorts is about. Since its conception, the festival’s mission statement has been not only to bring about an awareness of the medium and create a market for it, but also to make short films a starting point for emerging filmmakers. Through screenings at festivals, up-and-coming directors get the chance to have their films seen by producers and industry representatives, with the possibility of getting discovered. The festival’s greatest hope is to propel little known filmmakers into big time producers like George Lucas, who incidentally, also had his early student shorts shown during the festival’s very first screening.