Team Blog

Micha left rathershort.com and Berlin for some weeks to walk the Camino to Santiago de Compostela. Of course Micha choose to walk the way bare foot!

While he is on his way you can follow his trip on his blog. Wish you a great time, mate!

In German you say "Alles neu macht der Mai" - it means in May new things happen. We are early in this case and very happy at the same time to welcome a new team member to the rathershort crowd: Tina Roji joins us! Tina will be in charge of marketing activites and also visiting festivals and events related to the short film scene to improve our offline network. WELCOME!!!

Together with the HTW Berlin we recently started a new project. Four students of the field of media science and informatics will, together with rathershort (represented by Andy), concept and develop new tools to connect rathershort.com to other platforms, websites and services.

Andy, me and Micha have studied ourselves at the HTW and the school has the great habit to let students do projects with companies and real life products - this helps both sides of course, and we are looking forward a lot to new input from the participating students. Watch out for related news during the next week, of course I will also introduce the guys soon!

Become part of the jury and watch all shortfilms in high quality! During the next weeks we'll get more and more shortfilms and need an active jury that rates films. We are focused on getting active and film interested users for our jury to maintain the quality standards of the film pool.

Getting “active” means to write funded reviews about existing shortfilms. As soon as 3 different users declared your review as helpful we will consider to invite you to be a member of the jury. As jury member you can watch films before anybody else and choose whether they get accepted or not. Furthermore you can also watch all films in high quality.

Write helpful reviews, become a jury member!

As said before, rathershort went to the Clermont-Ferrand filmfest a while ago. To describe it in short: a fantastic audience for shortfilm and a great film market.

We arrived on early Saturday morning, when the festival had just started with its opening ceremony the evening before. Since the film market did not open before Monday we went straigt to the movies - the festival screens films in the International Competition, the French Competition and many smaller side series. The main cinema is located at the maison de la culture neear the center and it's just huge - arround 1400 people watching shortfilms is a scene you don't get to see very often, especially when this cinema is sold out through the whole week as well as most of the other venues.

We went only to International Comeptitions, mostly because of English subtitles not being available for the other screenings, even some of the international screenings did only have French subtitles - weird for an international festival of this size.

The quality of films presented had a wide range from perfect masterpieces im 35mm to first year in filmschool clips shot on DV - maybe this is a result of the approach to show films from as many countries as possible - but sometimes it was just annoying. Especially cause the majority of seleceted films was at least 10-15min in lenght.Nevertheless we had some highlights and hopefully we can present some very soon on rathershort.

A very good idea in my opinion is the morning press conference with filmmakers of premiered films screened the day before. It would be even better if translation was not to French but to English...

In general it was big fun just to watch good movies with a great crowd - the festival itselfs lacks some things that are provided elsewhere, like a common meeting place, a lounge or a bar to meet filmmakers and fans or free wireless internet to name a few. The most interesting part for us started when the film market opened - we had already scheduled lots of meetings with sales agencies, film festivals, film schools and national film institutes before and so the following days were very busy. We introduced rathershort.com to many people with the aim of finding new cooperations and birning more films onto the site, of course.

We had interesting talks to people from all over the world, from Mexico to India, from Japan to Romania (greetings to Vlad & Co!). Ever day starting at 5pm some stands started happy ours or little fingerfood parties, so it was easy to meet people and get in touch with each other. The film marked itself was located in a hall normally used for sports and it was definitely the right size, but of course crowded during the days - after 3 days of talking you definitely need a break then.

Our break meant going back to Berlin, Micha and me were working for the Berlinale Talent Campus, keeping the website running and taking care of local systems showing the participants works and offer netoworking possibilities - very interesting to work with 350 people from more than 100 countries =)

We also found the time to go to the European Film Market several times, one of the biggest feature film markets world wide. We met some of the people we talked to in Clermont already again and found a lot new contacts and information also related to the shortfilm business. After our job was done on last Thursday, we attended numerous screenings and came back to fulltime rathershort work this Monday..

Now we are getting back to all the filmmakers and companies we met during the last two weeks and we are optimistic that results can be seen in a while on rathershort.com =)

A big THANK YOU to ALEX and MARIE for being great hosts in Clermont-Ferrand - we are looking forward to seeing you in Clermont next year at the very latest, but hopefully before in Berlin!

We updated our player with new features - the most obvius is the audio control. We had long discussions if we need one of if people are able to regulate volume directly with their devices and we should keep it simple - ok, and now we have that...

But more has been done in the background - so the player can use plugins now for additional functionality, one example is the logo we now display if films are embedded on other websites - more will come soon.

We are back - and already at the next festival... We had a very intense week in Clermont Ferrand and before I finally find the time to wrap up and let you know what happend we are already at the next festival, the Berlinale. So I decided to leave the blog until end of the week to come back with a complete sum up and all news by then. Rock on!

Heya, it was kind of quiet in this blog the last days - we were really busy to prepare our trip to Clermont Ferrand - it's the biggest short film festival and we are looking very much forward to talk to zillions of people about films and rathershort (and of course we want to see as many films as possible, hehe).

I will try to post daily coverages about whats going on there, who we met and which are the hot topics. We scheduled meetings with many people, schools and companies already and have bags full of handout and flyer material to describe the platform and our ideas for shortfilm distribution. We hope meet interesting people, to estabish cooperations to bring new films on the site, extend our network in the short film scene and - of course - to have some fun =)

Tonight we all (Andy, Micha H, me and Tobias) meet in Freiburg, and tomorrow we go over to Clermont for the opening. 123go!

After releasing a festival world map we now have the same nice functionality for our movie pool. Look at this!

At the moment it shows a clear concentration to Germany and Europe - we hope to change this during 2009! Last week Micha and me met some asian filmmakers at the Asian Hot Shots Festival, and during the next weeks we go to the Festival of Clermont-Ferrand and to the Berlinale - we hope that afterwards the world map already displays more green dots all over the world! Cross fingers =)

Yesterday we improved the live search functionality, so now its possible to search not only films, but festivals and persons. Try it out!