Sundance 2013: How They Did It -- Shorts Directors on Landing Competition Slots

The five dramatic shorts comprising “Shorts Program I” screened in Park City to a full house on opening night of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Thursday, Jan. 17. Indiewire came in from the cold to the Egyptian Theatre's attic, which doubles as a green room, to hit up these filmmakers for their insights on how to land one of the festival's coveted 65 slots (selected from 8,102 short-film submissions). Here are tips from them and other shorts filmmakers in this year's program about financing a short, overcoming production obstacles and screening at festivals with an eye toward distribution and subsequent projects.

1. Raise Funding by Any Means Necessary

Michelle Morgan, a screenwriter making her directorial debut with “K.I.T.,” says she had expected to be able to produce her short for $500. The rude awakening of the actual price tag drove her and her producer Lauren Schnipper to crowd-funding platform Kickstarter with the goal of raising $5,000. For Kickstarter pitches, “a lot of people make videos, which confuses me, because they spend money [they don’t have] to make the video,” Morgan says. So instead, she threw together a shoebox diorama for her Kickstarter appeal.

“I felt incredibly awkward and tacky asking for money from people, so I just wanted to do it as quickly as possible and be done with it,” Morgan says. The pressure of knowing they would get none of the Kickstarter funds if they fell short instilled the director and her team with an effective desperation. They beat the goal — by $32 — using whatever tactics would get them there: Two-thirds of the funds came from Morgan’s network, but to get across the finish line, “We blackmailed some people,” Morgan admits.

2. Incorporate the Low Budget into the Aesthetic

Robert Machoian shot a series of 18 one-to-four-minute shorts on his iPhone, casting family and friends in the main roles. “Movies Made from Home #6” and “Movies Made from Home #15” are playing at this year's festival. Like the rest of the series, they are an attemptto “break down the technological parts of the filmmaking process and focus a little bit more on the story elements,” Machoian says.

His minimalist aesthetic and low-resolution hand-held phone camera provide an opening for narrative subtitles to dominate the storytelling. “What if we use subtitles as actually a medium form rather than as a way of translating the dialogue to just me, the viewer?”the director says he wondered. For instance, “Movies Made from Home #6” is a single, four-minute shot from a stationary camera with minimal panning. We see and hear kids playing hide-and-go-seek in a field, but the subtitles subvert the playful tone with an ominous explanation for why one of them is impossible to find.

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