Super-short fliks inspire budding filmmakers

I have just watched 24 films without a break. Three of them I watched twice. One of them, my favorite, I watched five times.

If these were feature-length films, I would have had to forego sleep for a couple of days. But these films, with titles like "Alarm," "Duel," and "Peace Talks," probably don't even qualify as shorts. They're ten-second films, in fact, all of them entries in the "Ten Second Films" competition.

The contest, a production of New York-based Candide Media Works, required entries to conform to strict constraints -- ten seconds in length, 320 x 240 pixels in size, and no more than six megabytes. More than 1,000 entries were received. The ten finalists will be named today (March 17). Winners will be announced March 31. Top prize is $1,000.

It would be easy to dismiss the ten-second film as nothing more than a novelty, but those ten seconds, notes Miles Kronby, the competition director and executive producer at Candide, can be used in a host of ways. "Like haiku, the constraints inspire creativity," says Kronby.

Some entrants tried to generate a laugh or two in their ten seconds. Others told a story, albeit a brief one. A number of films saw the contest as an exercise in visual poetry.

One approach was to view the ten seconds as a challenge, with the filmmaker cramming anything and everything into the film, often with jarring cuts between images.

Consider "Ten Seconds of Melee," an apt title for a film with images of snakes, the moon, skeletons and masked women. Among the entries, the film is unique for including an intermission. The word, "Intermission," pops on the screen midway through the film. But don't try to fire up the popcorn maker. If you do, you'll miss the second half before you're out of your seat.

Ten seconds may seem too short for a film, but just watch "Ten Seconds of Melee," "Drink," or "Oblivious," and you'll probably think otherwise.

For Kronby, the most exciting part of the contest was seeing the creativity of so many amateur filmmakers. With the Web to distribute films, with cheap equipment available to produce these mini-movies, amateurs are experimenting with film in the ways they have, for years, with art and writing.

When Candide started the contest, Kronby and his cohorts weren't sure what sort of entries they would get, and they have been surprised by the number of watchable, entertaining films entered in the competition. The top 200 were selected for the "Ten Seconds" site.

"As people have seen what other people can do in ten seconds, I think the quality has gone up over the course of the competition," says Kronby. "People get inspired by what other people are doing."

A ten-second film, he notes, doesn't take a whole lot of time to create. You can do it in a day, or maybe even a few hours, with relatively inexpensive equipment -- a digital video camcorder, say, or even a digital camera with a "movie mode" for capturing video clips.

The contest is no longer taking entries, but Candide does hope to transform "Ten Second Films" into an ongoing, sponsored event.

By Allan Hoffman
Last updated: Monday, March. 17, 2003, 6:49 pm