Short Flicks 2010: good stories shine through anyway

I guess it’s natural to be dismissive of home movies. We generally like our entertainment to be shiny and smooth-looking, qualities generally absent from the grainy outputs of our wannabe auteur friends.

For the technical purist, La Trobe Student Film and Theatre’s Short Flicks, would have been an unmitigated disaster. In the time it took to watch the 9 shorts, you would have learned a lot about how not to shoot a film.



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Not being a friend’s home screening, slipping out for a drink midway wasn’t an option. Sitting through it was the only polite thing to do, besides being the only option. Slinking out unnoticed from the middle row of a cinema is actually very hard to do.

By now, I would’ve made a fair number of new enemies with the above review, but wait seething friends, there’s more!

Films are more than just dollies and good lighting and good, levelled sound, it’s also about the story.

Technique has to come paired Tale. We end up with Avatar otherwise.

The short films screened at Short Flicks offered many different stories to the viewers. The coordinators selected very well, and judging by the audience’s reaction, their efforts were much appreciated.

The beauty of the short film format is the flexibility to experiment and really be out there, without having to really worry about trivial matters like continuity, plausibility and the like.

The shorts on show demonstrated this. The final selection covered a wide range of genres, from bro-coms to surrealist love stories. There were few dull moments in the program.


WHAT WE LIKED:

Blended

Built around the simple premise of being slusheed by a masked stalker, George Lingard’s  beautifully shot tale of suspense plays on the paralysing dread we feel when facing predictably bad days.

In the dark

Is there a term for human-furniture romance? This short film follows the budding romance between a girl and a desk lamp. A surreal love story set in the suburbs, we see how everything just wants to be loved.


Eulogy

Almost like a stoner movie of two bros writing each other’s eulogies. Almost.

Short Flicks introduces future auteurs

by Syar S Alia

Short Flicks is a short film program held by La Trobe Student Theatre & Film and has been going on for more than 10 years. We ask for script submissions - they can be about anything and can be anywhere between 1 minute (or even less if you want) to about 20 minutes (we negotiate with those who want to do something longer, we try and encourage people to keep it simple) - sometime in May, select from those submissions a handful to support and fund. We have 9 this year that has made it all the way from script, and on October 4th when we show them at ACMI cinemas, to screen.

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