If you’re new here, you’re probably seeing all of these short film reviews and wondering what’s up with me. I must be crazy spending time putting together these things together and posting them.

There’s a few reasons. One is I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year in lieu of pursuing a few other projects which eat up a lot of my time. Pre-Producer is one of the biggest ones, which I’ll get to in a later post. By cranking out a few hundred words a day I’m keeping that muscle from atrophying on me while coding.

The other one is a matter of exposure. Sure, any jerk can set up a blog these days and rant about how much something sucked and piss all over someone else’s hard work. I know, I get that every day. In short, I don’t want to ever be “that guy”. There’s some seriously great talent out there that is trying very hard to have their work seen. Notice how I don’t go all Roger Ebert in my reviews by simply saying how bad something was. I don’t believe any film is 100% awful, except for maybe Gigli.

Many of these filmmakers are still getting their legs and need positive and constructive feedback on where they might be weak but also how they might go about enhancing their next projects. Never judge a filmmaker (or writer) on one single work. That’s disingenuous. By being a callous and pompous dick about someone else’s work you may end up squashing out a creative flame before it has a chance to really shine. Don’t be that guy.

My criteria for reviewing a short isn’t set in stone, but it tends to follow a pattern:

• It has to be viewable online, preferably in 480p or higher format. I know that some short films were shot before HD was a household word or access to HD equipment wasn’t available, so this isn’t a hard and fast guideline.
• It has to be, well, short. The longest one I’ve reviewed thus far is 30 minutes. That’s pushing the envelope but it’s acceptable. Most of them fall between 9 and 12 minutes.
• It doesn’t have to pronounce how many awards its won. In fact, some of the best ones I’ve come across haven’t won anything at all.
• Nearly every one of the shorts I’ve reviewed have very few views on their respective hosting sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. That’s sad, when a Justin Bieber paparazzi video gets over a million hits and some of these languish in the backwaters of searches.
• It should tell a complete story. There’s a lot of “test shorts” out there one can find that were put up merely to demonstrate technical capabilities of a camera or lens but don’t tell a story.
• It should be shareable/embeddable and not blocked to any specific country, site, etc. There have been a few shorts that I would have otherwise reviewed had they not blocked their content for what I see are completely baseless reasons.

For now I’ve got a large stockpile of shorts queued up, but if you would like me to review your short film and it fits roughly in the above criteria, leave a comment below with a link and I’ll be more than happy to check it out.