A website designed and curated for short film enthusiasts and filmmakers.
Where Did FilmShortage Come From?
I spent the last year and a half working on a short film ‘After The Rain‘. After so much work and delays upon delays we finally released the short on April 15th. After much thought and research we opted for an online launch. We had several reasons to back up our decision; lack of experience, film festival submission expenses, more delays and so on…
Our release was a success, but was not an explosion like we would of wished. Twitter and Facebook helped us out tremendously, but we quickly noticed we were missing the bigger public features to get the exposure boost we wanted.
Once our short was released I plunged myself into researching to try to get our short featured on websites and blogs. What I noticed was that all the main blogs and sites promoted mostly films that are extremely innovative, with new technologies and new style, which is great and I love watching, but what about people that like the good ol’ style of narrative films, the ones with great stories?
I had posted on forums to try to assemble a good list of sites that allow you to submit your short film to an online audience, so I can then write up a blog to help filmmakers release their shorts. To my surprise I did not get much feedback, and the websites I got were the same 2 over and over again. And the ones that were different we’re not very attractive (I don’t understand how sites from the 90’s are still out there), or better yet you need to upload your short on their server database. I think it’s safe to say that YouTube and Vimeo have won the video database wars. And if anyone is like me, you prefer having your short in one location and having it feed out from there to other sites and blogs so you can easily keep track of views and stats.
So instead of writing a blog about how little there is out there I came up with a better idea; to put my next short film project aside and create a website for short film lovers. Film Shortage will feature new great shorts every week, we will carefully choose the best submissions and take into consideration each aspect of the film.
What Do We Like?
We just love good short films that entertain and inspire us. They do not have to be unique in every way, although we do encourage thinking out of the box. But our main targets for FilmShortage would be films with great stories, high quality picture, directing and editing. We also like to hear that shorts are made with a minimal budget, but we would not discriminate a higher budget film.
What Else?
Besides having the new main features every week, FilmShortage will also be on the look-out for awesome short film trailers! Trailers are shorter short films and usually become an art of their own, sometimes they even turn out better than the actual film (how many times have we seen this in Hollywood?). We want to see how seductive you made your film look! Submit us your trailers and if we like them with will post them.
Before creating FilmShortage, we thought about building a site just for local artists instead. Being based in Montreal (An independent film booming city), we felt that there is no or few online sites dedicated to local short films. This being said we found it hard to limit ourselves from the rest of the world, so we went for an international FilmShortage. But still feeling our homeland routs and urge to encourage local filmmakers, we decided to create a dedicated section to films from the province of Québec called “Films de chez nous” (Films From Home). We will frequently feature new submitted films in this section, in French, English or any other language. We embrace Québec’s multiculturalism! Alors envoyez-nous vos courts métrages!
We are very excited about our new site, and we will be committed to constantly updating and making our site even better! If you have any ideas or notice any bugs or mistakes on our very young site, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are very eager to hear about your comments on FilmShortage.com!
Hope you enjoy watching these fantastic shorts just as much as we do!
Don’t forget to follow Film Shortage:
Twitter: twitter.com/filmshortage
Facebook: facebook.com/filmshortage
Vimeo: vimeo.com/filmshortage
YouTube: youtube.com/user/filmshortage