Team Blog

At rathershort we love to present films from as many countries as possible - however, this brings different languages into the game. Every movie can have an english and an original language description, and also the whole page is available in German and English (watch out what comes next, hehe) .. not to forget that every film can have numerous subtitle languages.

.. so sometimes we can choose between different information to offer our users - depending on which languages they speak. An example: We have a great French film that has French and English information, and our user comes from Italy and speaks Italian and French. Now we can automatically show the french texts instead of the English standard texts.

So all you need to do is to do edit your own profile and set the languages you speak =)

As some of you may know, we have been organizing public shortfilm screenings during the last two years in Berlin, Cologne, Offenburg and Barcelona. We always present ten outstanding movies, often combined with music or performances at different locations like bars, clubs or circuses (yes!).

This weekend we screen shorts in Berlin for the opening of the Berlin Filmcamp on Nov 27 together with a nice party. One day later on Nov 28 we rock the house in Cologne with a great collection of shorts (amongst them: DENTOPHOBIA). Check out the website, it's www.strangeshorts.de (both English & German) and register for our newsletter if you are interested in watching great films in great atmosphere!

Festivalprofiles can include a connection to an existing blog of the festival via rss. This means, you can read the latest entries of a festival blog also on its rathershort.com profile page. A good example of this is the page of Molodist!

Today Micha & me met Olivia and Ben from Futureshorts Germany. Futureshorts is an international network and we definitely share our view on shortfilms:

Future Shorts is one of the leading and most innovative short film labels. Since 2003, Future Shorts has created a rapidly expanding network that allows filmmakers the opportunity to have their work seen on the largest theatrical platform worldwide.

Passionately believing in getting short films seen and creating a culture around the medium, Future Shorts is recognised by filmmakers, the industry and press alike as the cutting-edge short film label. Future Shorts is a worldwide monthly film festival as well as a distributor, sales agent, consultancy service and DVD label. This is fresh cinema- Future Shorts.

They screen shortfilms regularly in more than 100 cities world wide - in Germany for example in Berlin, Cologne and Bremen. Check out their website and their online video channels!

We will soon integrate information on their screenings into our news system - and we look forward to their next Berlin screening on February 6, 2009 right after start of the Berlinale. You should have a look at their international screening calendar.

Today rathershort.com has been public for 20 days - time for a mini statistic. We adressed mainly filmmakers the last days and with the first numbers we can be quite happy.

We got 250 new users, 2200 new visitors and about 22500 pageviews out of 74 countries worldwide (that's international, yes!). We have more than 60 films online and now we are looking forward to the next developments. Will be interesting to compare these numbers in some weeks, months and years =)

Rathershort wants to support filmmakers with presenting their shortfilms online in the best way possible. We have put together a list of useful tips and examples what can be (and should be) done to use the power of the net for your film projects:

How to find your online audience

We will update this list regularly and hope to receive lots of feedback during the next weeks and months.

We have some great new films online, go and check them out! There are more to come and we are very happy that filmmakers send in films and support the idea of rathershort. My personal favourite of our last new movies is The Ark - which films do you like? Go and write a review =)

Hey there - from today on rathershort.com makes creating subtitles very easy. We offer an integrated online tool that makes adding subtitles a simple task.

Filmmakers can now subtitle their own films, import already prepared subtitles (for festival screenings for example) and export in many different formats.

Filmmakers can enable the functionality for all users, so they can let other people subtitle their movie - you can see a link "translate this movie" on the film profile pages where subtitling is enabled!

Today we updated some layouts all over the page - and we can announce some new features for the festival search: It is possible now to search for festivals in the sourrounding of a certain festival (in the distance from 10 to 500 km) - so its easy to find festivals near your city!

I checked out interfilm and found 15 festivals in max 10km distance!

Festival profiles can also have logos and their own blog integrated (if they have one) - an example is the profile of .mov festival profile.

With these new features we started contacted many festivals to ask them to update their profiles with new information already - so the database will become even more valuable very soon.

Only hours before the start of the interfilm short film fest we launch a bunch of new features and start the whole thing on November 4, 2009.

Were are all looking forward and hope everthing works out as we expect!