Team Blog

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!

Another update to user profiles: Activities. You may know this from social networks like facebook, already - now it's on rathershort, too. Several actions are tracked and displayed on profiles of users. We will soon integrate this into more functions on the platform and plan to link it to social network sites in future.

Whoo: The whole world of festivals on one map. You can zoom in move around while festival locations are loaded and displayd. We will improve the accuracy soon and add some more info to the festival popups. Let us know how you like it!

The 2nd Asian Hot Shots Berlin is going to take place in Berlin next week. We are looking forward to watch great films, meet people and enjoy discussions and performances.

Find out more about the Asian Hot Shots and this years "Green Chilies Award" COMPETITION features. They have also a blog with their recent news at greenchilies.wordpress.com.

For us, this will be the kick off to bring some asian shortfilms onto rathershort.com, so watch out the next weeks!

Today Micha updated the website with some small functions. Every list can now be put into a playlist, so you can skip back and forth trough the search result. We will extend this step by step to include more options (creating own playlists, send to friend, put on dvd etc.)

The other update contains social profile icons and links for user profiles. Let other people know about your MySpace, Facebook or Skype contacts!

We added a small feature that may become more of a major part of rathershort over the coming weeks and months. Discussions are now possible for festivals and also on user profiles. Depending on the use of this feature we will take it a step further soon to make discussions on several topics and crosspostings work. What do you think?

Rathershort.com wishes you all a happy 2009. We celebrated our shortfilm new years come together already on December 30 with a big international film party. Our shortfilm screening series "strange shorts berlin" met the winter camp of "couchsurfing.com": 200 people from all over the world came to watch 10 films and to party with the great great great "Les Titz Grand" in our favourite location, the "L.U.X.". I think this was the first time to have stage diving people at a strange shorts party, yeah!

We will continue to improve rathershort.com this year and hope to enjoy a growing network of international film friends. Rock on!

Update: Flickr Stream and Les Titz Grand Video: