What is Local Shorts?
Tuesday, July 20 2004
Local Shorts is a short movie festival running for its 3rd year at the
Lobo Theater in Albuquerque, NM, on August 27th & 28th, 2005.
Our mission is to bring the Albuquerque community together, to
celebrate the work of local film makers.
While we do that, we want to help out locals in need, by working with
Albuquerque's charitable organizations.
How did all of this come about? Read on...
It was July of 2003, and my brother-in-law Jeff had just finished up a
short movie titled "Armadoggone!" starring his wonder-dog, Spotless.
We had spent much of the summer projecting movies on the wall in his
back yard, and Jeff wanted to get the family together for a
wall-screening of his new short.
We tossed around the idea of borrowing the historic Lobo Theater, to
accomodate a bit larger of a crowd, and the idea flowed from there. Why
not invite our friends to show their movies as well? Heck, why not
invite the whole city, and make a big party of it?
Jeff came up with the name, as a humourous play on "Worldwide Pants,"
David Letterman's famous production company. If you know Jeff, you know
he likes his play-on-words!
We decided to go for it, and planned a date 3 weeks out. We figured
that was plenty of time. Boy, did we ever learn!
It took a lot of work, but we did it, in spite of the 'short' time
frame. We ended up with 12 movies, for a total of 90 minutes of
content. We ran films from elementary students, professional directors,
and about every station in between.
About 150 people came to see the movies, and everyone we talked to said
they had a great time. The best part, for me, was getting to meet all
of the people that had some part in making the movies. Everyone,
regardless of how long they've been working with movies, was baring a
piece of themselves up on the screen. It was a real pleasure just to
shake their hands, and tell them what a great job they did. You've
never seen bigger smiles.
In Year 2, we built on the successes, and the lessons learned, from the
first year; We kicked off with an 'Artist's reception,' held next door
to the Lobo at Zinc, where movie makers could meet, greet, and enjoy
some great food. We ran 29 local movies, in a 6 hour event, had as many
as 300 people in the theater at one time, and almost 500 in and out
throughout the day. Then we wrapped up with a Q&A with the movie
makers.
And now, we're doing it again! This year it's going to be even bigger,
but our roots remain - we're a local, family run film festival. We'll
be here with our kids and our friends. So come down and join us. We'd
love to see you, and your movies.
Dan