One-minute movies make their mark

In the era of YouTube home movies, an international festival is channeling filmmaking quality into a 60-second format designed to challenge filmmakers, writers, animators, artists, designers and creative producers to develop and submit the world’s best one-minute films

Simona Fodor

John Ketchum (pictured above), co-executive director and head of the jury for the Filminute film festival, traces the beginnings of the project to a similar film festival in Brazil, when he was asked to bring some of the films showing there to Romania.

“I had just finished my first feature film and so anything short was pretty exciting and I probably paid more attention to that. I looked at it and said no, it’s not very interesting to me. There were a lot of films on that website but none of them grabbed me, a lot of them were experimental,” Ketchum says. Still, he put the idea out into his network and got very positive feedback, most importantly from his current main partner Sabaa Quao, who is based in London, one of the cities where films in the festival have been shown, alongside Bucharest and Toronto.

Read more about

Former athlete Ana Maria Branza to carry Olympic Flame in France for Olympic Games

read more

Besides the artistic challenge of doing a one-minute film, Ketchum, who came to Romania as marketing director of Connex, the Canadian-financed mobile operator bought by Vodafone in 2005, says another attraction was the potential spotted in the need for good content for mobile devices. “For five or six years we touched on content for phones and there was nothing. And you could see that potentially there would be a need for good content.”

With this in mind, the one-minute idea seemed just the thing, as the timing would make it suited to a large variety of formats. “We thought one minute was perfect because it would go on mobile phones, it wouldn’t kill the batteries, it would go on the internet, it would work on television, it had worked in theaters before – it’s got something,” Ketchum says. The selected films can currently be seen on the iPhone and other smart phones.

The organizers say the festival was very focused on quality from the beginning, and films submitted need to be story-focused. “A lot of the internet is gags and we don’t go for gags. We try to avoid the cheap laugh because that wouldn’t be a film anyway,” Ketchum says. To this end, the festival organizers provide feedback to filmmakers who have submitted their work. “One thing people don’t realize when they go ‘whoa, the films are really good!’ is that it’s because with over half of them we’ve helped the filmmaker. So we’ve got a film and then said, ‘ok, but you need to work on your sound’.”

Given the versatility of the format, the organizers insist this is not an internet film festival. Films in previous editions have been screened in various locations. In Romania the films were shown in the Orange concept store, and were also broadcast by Prima TV. In 2008 they were shown in the Selfridges store in London, last year they were broadcast in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and this year they can also be seen in a theater in Moscow.

The variety of the venues is just one reflection of the global spirit the festival aims to embody, and one of the plans is to bring one-minute filmmakers from different places to do a film that’s shot globally, putting together scenes shot in different locations of the world.

The requirement for the film length to be exactly sixty seconds is what defines the festival and makes it appealing to both directors and the jury. For directors a one-minute film means a significantly lower budget. “If you want to put in a full day of preparing, full day of shooting, and full day of post-production and editing you should be able to make a very good one-minute film and that’s something where you could ask a really good actor, ‘could I have you for a day?” and they might do it for free. So there’s an accessibility that the minute allows.” And with its short format and presence of advertising people on the jury, some four or five filmmakers end up being contacted by the ad agency that was on the jury that year, and a few ads have happened, Ketchum says.

The big names assembled on the jury is what makes the festival attractive to directors submitting their works. When putting the jury together, organizers try to make it relevant and contemporary, with a mix of people from film, the arts, advertising, and literature. While past names on the jury have included Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian novelist who wrote The English Patient, and Paul Haggis, who wrote the scripts for Crash and Million Dollar Baby, this year the line-up includes Neill Blomkamp, the South African director of District 9; Mark Tutsell, global chief creative officer for Leo Burnett Worldwide; Jan Lumholdt, the Scandinavian film critic for the popular Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet; film historian and critic Ronald Bergan; and Indian director and writer Tanuja Chandra.

“I would like to eventually turn it into something where significant things happen to the filmmakers after,” Ketchum says.

And with movie studios taking the internet more seriously because of budget cuts associated with the crisis, it might just happen.

Video on demand platforms and content licensing deals are some of the opportunities available after the festival. So far, Filminute has done licensing deals with narrowcast networks and VOD platforms in Canada and formed festival partnerships in Canada, France, Italy, Romania and Australia. Furthermore, this year organizers are trialing a new mobile platform in India called Jigsee. “I’m betting a lot on the internet and the need for good content,” Ketchum says.

The festival also hosts a public’s choice award. To vote, go to www.filminute.com before September 30!