BEST DOCUMENTARY
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An easy-breezy sociological experiment, with a Buzzfeed premise and lovely production values, BAFTA nominee Samuel Abrahams’ Offline Dating is the complete package. Its highly successful online release wasn’t without controversy, but its good heart and relatable sentiments, connected with love-longing audiences the world over.
MOST INSPIRING
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BEST STUDENT
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Big year for Ben Aston. We featured him twice in 2014, and his palette-cleansing side-project Russian Roulette won Sundance London. The film Aston was trying to get his mind away from? His London Film School graduation project He Took His Skin Off For Me. With massively difficult but bloody phenomenal practical effects work (which Rob Munday details in a Q&A w/ Aston here) providing the clickbait draw, the film went supremely viral, but it’s the writing and storytelling’s deeply melancholic meditation on love & sacrifice that earns it a spot here.
BEST ACTION
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Best action? More like Best AWESOME. An interesting fusion of beautifully gory ultraviolence and a don’t give an F attitude, Odin’s Afterbirth plays like a indie animation version of the famous manga Berserk filtered through Adult Swim. Aside from its badassery, what’s interesting about the film is its genesis–3 parts created over the span of many years, the project gaining momentum and awesome animation collaborators along the way. Perhaps the most gleefully fun film on the list, it has been criminally under-seen, and is highly recommended.
BEST DRAMA
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James Johnston’s humane SXSW drama flew a bit under the radar this year, but its effortless Texas cool combined with the sensitivity of its plotting combines to showcase Johnston’s rare ability to capture the interiority of its main character. That the film has one of the most cathartic releases in recent short film history is icing on the cake.
BEST INTERACTIVE
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It’s been a transition year for interactive projects. The movement of audiences away from desktop consumption to mobile has been tough, but app interfaces beckon. A smartly constructed project, {The And} capitalizes on our innate fascination with the lives of others to create compelling stand alone linear films, but also draw audiences into multiple levels of engagement. Acquired by Conde Nast out of Sundance, it also represented a key 2015 trend, the burgeoning interest of old-media in shorts, something we’ll be on the lookout for more of in 2016.
BEST ANIMATION
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Oh Willy… has been legendary to those of us who frequent the fest circuit, an inside secret we could lord over the lay people. It is that good, and the twist that surprising. The massive scale of festival success often means the indefinite tie-up of rights to various TV deals, so there was not much expectation we’d ever be able to share this iconic gem. Then on a fine day in November it showed up on Vimeo, and the world has been a slightly better place ever since.
SHORT OF THE YEAR!
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As fun as it is to champion unknown but worthy talents, it would be disingenuous to not recognize the remarkable achievement of Kung Fury, and its even more remarkable cultural impact. List the events: a massively viral trailer leads to a phenomenally successful Kickstarter, leading to the concept being optioned for development before it had even received its debut, which happened to be at CANNES of all places, then, with the hype at a fever pitch, it goes online and then somehow becomes an EVEN BIGGER DEAL. Wow! Not since Kony 2012 (ominously enough) do I think a short film has had this kind of pervasive effect on the internet, and even better this was a true grassroots fandom phenomenon not celeb-driven. It really is just that awesome, and everyone felt compelled to tell everyone else how much they needed to watch it. Now we are telling you as well.
Honorable Mentions
When screening films from submissions, this is the kind of film you dream of finding. Unremarkable on the surface, it grows progressively more strange as the outrageous concept solidifies. A masterful, high-wire act of writing and performance.
From the SotW Award recipient studio 3DAR, this polished sci-fi teaser was the most complete package we saw this year in the genre, balancing concept and vfx beauty with equal aplomb.
A completely different type of sci-fi, Courtney Marsh’s odd mediative piece of filmmaking was the most confident directing performance we saw this year, no wonder she’s a contender for this year’s Oscars.
One of the weirder trends this year was the prevalence of overhead camera view. No less than THREE shorts featured on SotW this year presented this technique, Me & You, God View, and Growth. That’s not a good enough reason to get on this list itself, but we also happen to really love Me & You, a montage of a relationship from start to finish. It’s sweet, and clever, and reminds us a lot of another of our favorite films, 2013’s winner, Orange Drive.