Awesome Short Films

This award-winning animated film from École des Nouvelles Images drops us onto an island where a volcanic eruption threatens a flock of birds. As the cloud of dust and lava bursts into the sky, two birds try their best to save their eggs from disaster. The short does a great job of ramping up the tension while remaining lighthearted in its approach.

Skateboarding sensei Gou Miyagi is a master of the grind. Thrasher Magazine takes us to Miyagi-Do for a lesson in balance, precision, and style with an entertaining demo reel from the unconventional freestyle. If you never saw it, check out Gou’s classic video from Heroin Skateboards.

This animated short film follows an overworked woman who’s falling apart at the seams under the stress of everyday life. Can she escape the chaos? Writer/Director Sam Southward and a talented team of artists and animators bring the story to life with brilliant character design and a clever use of space and motion.

(PG-13: Language) Clara Aranovich-Valdés’ darkly comedic short film offers a unique spin on teen slasher flicks. When a pair of murderers show up at the same summer camp on the same night, they end up in a deep philosophical discussion about their life choices. Will Lagos and Jeremy Radin wrote the story and star as the killers, Kevin and Greg.

This science fiction short film tells an original story while demonstrating what’s possible with state-of-the-art computer graphics. Oscar-winning VFX artist Tim Webber of Framestore used Unreal Engine to create FLITE, which follows the story of a woman imprisoned in her hi-rise apartment building and the stranger who helps her make a daring escape from the tower.

This science fiction short film from Dan Ciraulo’s Dark Path VFX drops us into an encounter between a large spaceship and an unknown vessel. A group of fighter pilots is sent to confront the non-responsive craft and investigate its origin. But what they find when they get there is shocking. (Thanks, Rob!)

Finnish skiing channel Real Skifi created this clever short film as a tribute to the filmmaking tool known as the transition. Using a mix of edits, fades, and split screens, skiers are transported seamlessly between locations and times of day and swap places in the middle of rail grinds and other tricks.

As teenagers, we all felt peer pressure at one time or another. Anthony Sneed’s lighthearted short film SWIPE explores the consequences of giving in. After a boy’s friends push him to shoplift from a convenience store, he gets taught a valuable life lesson.

(PG-13) Evan Hallbeck’s short film is as tasteless as it is hilarious. It follows the story of three disgusting items that ended up in the sewer and tells their origin stories through a trio of live-action vignettes. You can pretty much guess where this is going from the thumbnail. Savannah Steiner is responsible for the gross-out animation.

What happens when you ask an artificial intelligence to write a script for a short film about AI’s impact on society? You get this dystopian nightmare. Nobody & The Computer posted this AI-generated movie, which imagines what the future might look like once we all have AI-powered augmentations and robots have taken all of our jobs. (Thanks, Rob.)

When a creature awakens in the woods, he searches the depths of his memories for clues as to how he got there and why he’s in the condition he’s in. Animator Aiden Whittam and written/director Ryan Oligmueller’s stop-motion short film takes on the difficult topic of depression in an artful and compelling way. Watch the behind-the-scenes footage here.

Digital artist Erik Wernquist welcomes us to a planetary orbiter that rotates at 1 RPM to generate artificial gravity for its occupants. The luxurious environment inside looks like it could be a home away from home for über-rich visitors. However, devoid of people and bathed only in natural light, it takes on a haunting quality.

Not to be confused with the bonkers 1982 film of the same name, Zach Tolchinsky’s stop-motion animated short has a decidedly more coherent plot. It follows a man living in the ruins of civilization when a flash of light appears outside his bunker. He could stay safely inside, but instead, he risks everything and heads into the Forbidden Zone to investigate.

In animator Zoë Hutber’s award-winning short film, a couple feels crushed by the burden of a society where everyone is literally made of money. As the fat cat at the top of the heap continues to demand a chunk of their flesh, only time will tell if their investments will ultimately pay off.

With greedflation on the rise and personal incomes not keeping up, it’s not easy to make a decent living these days. Animator Ben Meinhardt’s short film Living the Dream offers a darkly comedic look at modern life for a guy who graduates from school and leaves his parents’ house only to face a harsh reality in the big city.

(Flashing images) Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. To create his short film SIGNS, filmmaker Daniel McKee spent months collecting images of thousands of road signs from around the world, then arranged and animated them in a logical sequence. The music by Resonate complements the videos’ driving pace.