Shorts are Sweet

 Today we'd like to shine a spotlight on the excellent collection of shorts (5-8 minutes) we've discovered on the website, California is a Place: Stories from the Golden State. Not your usual travelogues, these little gems are what producers Drea Cooper and Zachary Canepari call a web-series: an emerging genre of online filmmaking, unrelated characters and stories that, when viewed together, tell the story of a place.

If you're one of those short filmmakers who submit their work to Sundance - along with 3000 others each year - you know how hard it is to get your short seen. Cooper and Canepari are figuring out a way. In their off-the-beaten-track road stories you'll meet a scraper bike team, locals disheartened by drug smugglers, a sex doll maker, a romantic mariachi player and an Alameda car salesman. Beautifully shot and edited, these are quirky and compelling vignettes, but not quite so nostalgic as the "On the Road" pieces produced by legendary journalist Charles Kurault in the 1970s.  According to Cooper, "the films are really meant to be moments and slices of a person's life." An alternative to reality television programming, anyone?

Re-working Re-Creations

Remember those nonfiction cable shows you used to watch featuring re-created scenes of badly-costumed pirates, peasants and yeomen? You know, those filler shots produced to cover long minutes of interviews or narration talk, talk, talk.

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Girls at a Crossroads

Many of you might have seen this video released earlier in the year, but we thought at the close of 2010, we'd like to take another look at it and, in our small way, contribute to spreading the word. A masterful piece, the charming animation serves as a sharp contrast to the compilation of shocking facts and statistics.

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Dorothy Height Tribute

Watch this wonderful tribute to civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height, produced by LA-based Wednesdays in Mississippi, a documentary film-in-progress, and our friends Marlene McCurtis and Cathee Weiss.

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Video Wall Alive with Motion

For a look at an innovative blend of new media and techology, make a visit to our own Torrance Art Museum here in SoCal. Yorgo Alexopoulos has mounted "No Feeling is Final," a computer animated high definition video wall that explores transcendental sensibilities through a commanding array of imagery and motion.

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