Rawstock: Epic and Why Shorts Matter

Rawstock is a short film festival that is put on throughout the year. Each Rawstock event features a fresh batch of top quality short films from around the world. The first showing of the year was March 5th and it featured eleven short films.

Short films are made for a variety of reasons. Traditionaly short films have a limited market. They are shown at film festivals to a few hundred people and rarely go beyond. The internet has opened up the opportunity to get a wider audience but there still is not a lot of financial return for the short film maker. So why make a short film? Short films can introduce a character or story idea that can translate into a feature film. Once the short is complete it can be shown to financial backers to entice investment in the feature film. “I Sell the Dead” took this route and even used the entire short in the feature film. Making a Short, can be a great way to practice your craft and put together a team for future projects. If something or someone is not working out you can make adjustments before going into a feature project. There are also a few filmmakers that just love to focus only on short films. The Seattle group ‘Pucker’ makes 5-6 short films a year and are releasing them as a collection on DVD.

The films shown at Rawstock run the gambit. I can see several of them as features and others were just great fun films.

David Lobser’s ‘Elephant Girl’ showcases his unique highly stylized animation. It is a cross between ‘Hello Kitty’ and ‘A Nightmare Before Christmas’. Checkout dlobser.com to see full versions of some of his other shorts.

Darrius Scheider, one of the event’s cordinators, showed ‘The Schlockmann Method’ which is the third film in his ‘Towel Trilogy’. It was fun to watch but don’t expect to see the feature any time soon.

Cream, a sketch comedy crew from Los Angeles, contributed ‘We Got That B-Roll’. They have a flair for making silly films and love to parody commericials, reality TV and anything normally serious. You can find more of their work on funnyordie.com

My favorite film of the evening was ‘I Love Sarah Jane’. If you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to Zombie flicks then this one is for you. The only survivors of the Zombie hoard are a group of kids. They keep the last remaining Zombie chained up in the back yard and have fun with teasing and torturing it. The subplot is a kids crush on a slightly older girl played by Mia Wasikowska. The film works because in only 14 minutes the filmmaker introduces us to a world with well developed characters behaving in a believable fashion.

The night concluded with an after party at Liberty Bar.

This was a great evening of film, drinks and networking with other film lovers. Join their facebook group to find out about future events- http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=50208338259&ref=ts