SXSW was a month ago, since then I have intended to write about some of the films I saw there. It was a great education for me to see amazing short subject narrative, documentary and animation work at the festival. I would like to tell you some of what I learned here. Most of these films aren’t available to watch on sites like Vimeo or YouTube so it’s hard to come home from the festival and review what you’ve seen. I understand that filmmakers have to keep their work offline so it can debut at the various festivals. I suspect more will be released online as the festival season progresses. As I run into some of the great stuff from SXSW online I’ll be sure to post links here.
Here is the big, no surprise, take away from seeing dozens of shorts at SXSW. Gear heads, listen up. This is coming from a RED camera owner who cares a lot about technical quality: When the acting, direction and story are good you can get away with pretty average quality. Even the dreaded Canon 5d’s anti-aliasing and rolling shutter didn’t matter on a 40 foot screen if the performance was good enough. On the other hand, great image quality doesn’t fix an average story.
In a reel SXSW called Global Shorts I saw this gem. The Perfect Fit. Directed by Tali Yankelevich. You can’t see the full 9 minute version but there is a trailer online. I believe this is a great example of a director finding a simple, real story and telling it very well. It’s probably the kind of story most people would never look into.
Tags: art, ballet, craftsman, dance, documentary, Scotland, shoe, SXSW, toe
