Focus Forward: Short Films, Big Ideas DEADLINE: 8/23

[The Coordinator]

 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 Meand 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.”