#ShortFilmADay Challenge Recap

During September, we featured a short film every day, to promote general awareness of short films and the great talent behind them, and to help people find some excellent shorts. Today we’re listing all the short films we featured. We’re also including a bunch of fun graphs to illustrate the data behind the short films!

These are the shorts we featured:

• Day 1: Split Costs (directed by Jeffrey Palmer) (online premiere)
• Day 2: Let’s Not Panic (directed by Heather Jack)
• Day 3: Temple (directed by Nguyen-An Nguyen)
• Day 4: Penny (directed by Stuart Stanton)
• Day 5: Touch (directed by Lulu Wang)
• Day 6: Getting Fat In A Healthy Way (directed by Kevork Aslanyan)
• Day 7: Vicious (directed by Oliver Park)
• Day 8: Blue Girls Burn Fast (directed by Amandla Stenberg)
• Day 9: Brenda (directed by Matteo Bertoli)
• Day 10: Habeas Corpus (directed by Booker T. Mattison)
• Day 11: Points of Origin (directed by Anya Leta)
• Day 12: Similitude (directed by Tim Guzman)
• Day 13: Soar (directed by Alyce Tzue)
• Day 14: Five (directed by Katina Mercadante)
• Day 15: Tight Jeans (directed by Destiny Ekaragha)
• Day 16: Eliza (directed by Mikko Löppönen)
• Day 17: This Is How (directed by Brian M. White)
• Day 18: Dawn (directed by Rose McGowan)
• Day 19: Boxer (directed by Toy Lei) (online premiere)
• Day 20: The Decelerators (directed by Mark Slutsky)
• Day 21: Into The Labyrinth (directed by Leire Egana)
• Day 22: Scapegoat (directed by John DeVries)
• Day 23: Run (directed by Thea Gajic)
• Day 24: Dol (directed by Andrew Ahn)
• Day 25: Leaving Eva (directed by Faye Gilbert)
• Day 26: Numbers (directed by Robert Hloz)
• Day 27: Speed Dating (directed by Meghann Artes)
• Day 28: A Long Walk (directed by Chinonye Chukwu)
• Day 29: Outside (directed by Tracy Pitts)
• Day 30: Resolve To Be Ready (directed by Eugene Sun Park) (online premiere)

#Shortfilmaday Data

For me, it was both an incredibly challenge and a lot of fun to collect and curate the short films. I wanted to have a great distribution of perspectives, and so made it my main goal to get an equal amount of shorts directed by men and women, to feature shorts from all over the world, and to keep track of whether they passed the Bechdel and DuVernay tests.

Not all shorts passed these tests, but most of them did! My testing was rather rudimentary (as, to be honest, are the tests themselves, I would prefer more concrete guidelines), as not every short featured more than one women or person of colour, or any at all, which would technically make them fail the tests. To be fair, due to the short runtime of short films, they rarely feature more than three characters, anyway.

In the shorts that featured only one woman and/or person of colour, I judged whether or not they contributed a significant amount to the story, and wasn’t just there as token or “prop”. If there were no women or people of colour present at all, they failed the test. Mostly, the only reason for them to fail the test was because there were no women or people of colour in the film at all.

I’ve created a few graphs because I just love seeing this visually – I’ll never deny I’m a bit of a nerd! Bow down to my beautiful Excel pie charts:

Future iterations of the #shortfilmaday challenge

I’d be very happy to run the #shortfilmaday challenge again in a few months. It’s a great honour to feature these great works of art and to promote the filmmakers who made them, and they so deserve the attention! I hope you enjoyed this little challenge and hope you’ll join us next time!

If you enjoyed the #shortfilmaday challenge, please let me know in the comments below. I’m also eager to hear any suggestions if there’s anything you think I should do something differently in the future. 

(top image: Points of Origin short film)