About
Truth be told, there are really a great number of amazing short films available for free viewing online. The biggest obstacle facing viewers is finding those few gems amongst the enormous heap of garbage they’re buried in. Short of the Week sifts through all that garbage and pulls out only those that are worth a viewer’s precious time. The goal of this site is to bring festival-quality films to a broader, non-festival-going audience.
Reviewers
Jason Sondhi
Like so many cinema-bloggers, Sondhi fancies himself an artist, but finds that he wears the hat of critic so much more easily. Living in Seattle, he met up with ASA at the University of Washington and the two embarked on a heartfelt coming of age tale reminiscent of The Adventures of Milo and Otis, fighting off danger and the naysayers in collaborating on all sorts of film-related projects. ShortoftheWeek is but the latest of these collaborations.
Sondhi brings to ShortoftheWeek his writing skills and “triple threat” capabilities; approaching films from the perspective of an uber-fan, 
knowledgeable film academic, and sometimes filmmaker. His tendency to overthink his film criticisms is due to a background in Philosophy, but he is putting useless intellectualizing aside for this site, and is focusing on putting it to good use through a series of academic articles on Anime.
Sondhi promises not to let the fame and fortune derail him in his quest to provide solid, reviews of great, freely available short films. His only regret is that ShortoftheWeek only reviews Good films, thus denying him the critic’s true pleasure of eviscerating the dreck that he culls through regularly for the site.
Favorite Recent Feature Film: The Fountain
Anime Recommendation: Wolf’s Rain
Young Artist recommendation: Andrew Schoultz
- Email thoughts & recommendations to sondhi@shortoftheweek.com
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Andrew S Allen
Andrew makes no attempt to hide his love for the under-appreciated magic of animation. As a reviewer, he brings a definite filmmaker’s perspective often dissecting a film’s technical construction. However, he never forgets that in this modern age of storytelling, a strong story always reigns supreme.
ASA (Andrew S. Allen) grew up in the small, rural town of Bethel, Alaska knowing life at its most fundamental. He was formally trained in visual communication design, but always felt the urge to record life in motion. His first experience in digital filmmaking back in 1999 involved crashing his high school’s only editing station after layering too many effects in iMovie.
With the birth of Polymix Media (a small group of filmmakers and designers headed by Andrew), he has begun combining his love for video with that of design. Polymix’s first release, Push For Signal, has been a surprise success, screening at a slew of international festivals. Following it is Flight, the tragic history of aviation, and, most recently, the personal love story, Mi Amore. The first two can be found online at AtomFilms.com.
- Email your recommendations: asa@shortoftheweek.com
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Matthew M. Foster
Matthew has never been convicted of killing any of the many quasi-filmmakers who create abominations on celluloid each year. He is, however, in favor of such heroic acts. What can be more criminal than burying must-see gems in mountains of video trash? He’s made it his job to uncover the art. Does that sound arrogant? Good. Who needs a wishy-washy critic?
Matthew is the director of the Dragon*Con Independent Film Festival, which annually brings filmmakers, features, and the best in short film to Atlanta. He is a frequent panelist on film criticism and history, has been a judge at multiple fests, and even acted as an emcee for TromaDance. He writes a monthly film column for the short
fiction review magazine, The Fix and maintains a film criticism website, FosteronFilm.com.
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Richard Propes
Since 1989, Richard Propes has traveled over 3,000 miles by wheelchair and raised over $250,000 for children’s organizations throughout the world on his one-man Tenderness Tour, a form of extreme activism that has resulted in his being recognized with the highest awards for community service in Indiana, Kentucky and Prevent Child Abuse America’s top national award, the Donna J. Stone Award. After nearly 19 years of grassroots activism, Richard is a highly sought speaker in the areas of child abuse, domestic abuse and peace/justice issues.
Richard’s passion for activism led him to organize the Compassion Street Arts Festival in Indianapolis and this, in turn, led to his first gig as an arts critic. A longtime freelance writer, Richard is the co-founder of IndependentCritics.com and the founder/publisher of The Peaceful Critic, a website that allows him to indulge in his love for film and social justice issues.
Richard is a licensed Brethren minister currently attending Bethany Theological Seminary in Richmond, Indiana while working as a Service Coordinator for the State of Indiana’s Bureau of Developmental Disabilities Services.
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MarBelle
MarBelle has spent lots of time dabbling with filmmaking projects, none of which he has ever been happy with. What he is happy doing is watching everything he can get his hands on and finding jobs that give him a legitimate excuse to drill filmmakers about why their films are better than his. His latest self-created excuse is a podcast called Directors Notes and has proven a pretty effective way to pry filmmaker secrets from the heads of his guests each week. Now he just needs to pick up that darn camera again.
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Ian Lumsden
UK resident, Ian commenced his career in the city of Liverpool teaching Drama where he discovered the students were more talented than he was. He moved on to teach English, in the course of which he wrote and edited publications and books for the educational market sadly now dropped from the catalogues. He is presently Vice Principal of a large specialist performing arts college in the north of England. It was there that he introduced Animation as an examination subject for students aged 14-16. His students and school website have won international awards for their work. Consequently he has been invited to talk at national and regional conferences where his lively and witty style is often missed by audiences keen to move on to the cartoons. He has strong ties with Adobe giving presentations on the use of Flash software to make animation accessible to students of all abilities.
A year ago, on a whim, he commenced the Animation Blog in which he reviews animations from around the world. He never tires of the thrill of receiving emails from animators applauding his articles and pointing out the tiny and not so tiny errors. He has almost inadvertently discovered a passion for animation as a medium for exploring and presenting often complex, demanding issues. Despite an initial predisposition towards computer aided animation he is more than ever impressed by the virtues of physically applying a hand generated pencil to paper. He is also developing a knowledge of animators not only across the globe but through the 20 th and 21st centuries. He can as well enjoy Ted Avery as Michael Dudoc de Wit.
