AUGUST 23 DEAD,INE

http://www.focusforwardfilms.com/#challenge  *Focus Forward: Short Films,
Big Ideas*

CINELAN, an online publisher of nonfiction shorts. Unlike YouTube or Vimeo,
it isn’t a platform for user-uploaded content. Instead, it commissions work
by filmmakers it trusts and then actively seeks to get this work
distributed across multiple platforms, including festivals, websites such
as Hulu, and publications such as *The Washington Post*. CINELAN is
currently working on packaging groups of shorts for two new platforms: VOD
and pre-movie content at traditional first-run theaters.

In its early years, CINELAN concentrated on building a brand, relying on
well-known filmmakers such as Liz Mermin, Steve James and Jessica Yu to
create great shorts that would attract potential partners to underwrite
future projects. It’s a strategy that worked – in 2011, CINELAN announced
that mega-cap corporation GE would be underwriting a series of 30 short
films made around the themes of invention and innovation for a series
called *Focus Forward: Short Films, Big Ideas* (www.focusforwardfilms.comWhile
developing the site, Martesko-Fenster and Spurlock discovered that the
average film viewing time online was 2.6 minutes. They promptly made it
part of their manifesto that no CINELAN film would be longer than three
minutes. Spurlock, director of *Super Size Me*and *The Greatest Movie Ever
Sold*, sees the site’s bite-size content as a way to turn regular viewers
into doc fans. “Anybody will give you three minutes, and once they watch
those three minutes, 99 percent of people want to watch another,” he says.
“It becomes like a potato chip. You don’t want just one.”