The Proper Use of a Shorts Selection Committee
By
Christopher J. Garcia

A popular decision making course features the following axion: ‘It becomes very obvious when you’ve made a bad decision’. When I heard this, it became obvious to me that the poor fool who said the statement had never done programming for a film festival. The selection process is never good enough for everyone, and even if it is, it does not become apparent until after the lights come back up from the final screening. It’s a terrible feeling to put together a program that just doesn’t work after days and weeks of viewing and debating. I’ve been there when shorts hit the screen and in the middle of each film, you can tell the audience is just waiting to get on to the next one. The reason these accidents happen? The selection process is almost always flawed.
Now, that’s not to say that there are not festivals that put out very good shorts programs, because there are dozens of them out there, but the stars just align themselves perfectly for them. Seldom is the selection process what makes a program good, but the films themselves should usually get the credit. Here now, I shall detail what should be considered when planning to begin selecting shorts for a shorts program.

The Selection Committee
There are many fests that only invite films. These fests tend to employ one person, or sometimes a small team, who scour the world looking for shorts. It’s a great way to go, but it is certainly not for every fest, if only because it can be an expensive proposition to get the right person. A single person’s views can also be too stuck in one position, and while that does lend itself to establishing a single voice for the festival, it doesn’t really work beyond a certain stage and it will hurt growth in the long run. The Selection Committee is the best way to go.
Selecting several people to watch a ton of shorts is an excellent choice, especially if the committee is willing to volunteer their time. This method scales well, allows for catch-up to be played by a group instead of by an individual, and allows for healthy debate. Just pulling any five people off the street won’t work, as choosing who will be the ones to choose the films is almost as important as which films those people will eventually choose. There are no hard and fast rules, but there are a few things that should be considered.
Picking Your Vision
First, choose a vision. Whatever that vision is, you’ve got to understand what it means and how it affects the viewing process. If you are putting on a science fiction festival, you’ve got to decide whether you want to use folks who are lovers of films with all sorts of hardware and gadgetry or whether you want a group who is more in tune with social sci-fi. Likely, you’d want a mix, but even that must be properly articulated. Vision, in all its form, will help and even if the shorts program is a part of a larger fest, the shorts program needs its own steering vision to assist in the choice of selectors.
Once you’ve got a vision, it is best to look at your pool of possible selectors. You’re going to need people with a fair amount of time on their hands. This is the most important thing. The perfect person to bring forth the vision of the program is useless if they can’t find the time to watch the shorts. People who can watch films during work are excellent choices, though a rare breed. Once you’ve found folks with the time to sit down and watch, you need to get the right people. A temptation that is hard to fight is to select people that are names in the field of film. Writers for well-known film magazines or websites, filmmakers, critics, these are all good choices, but they are usually hard to get time on and don’t always carry an audience slant towards things. One of the most successful selection committees I sat on featured a couple of major film buffs, a festival rat, a recent film school graduate, and a theatre projectionist. The tastes of the committee ranged from camp and horror lovers to a dark realism and romance fan to a pair hard core comedy worshippers. The differences worked as the umbrella concept of the committee was well-defined.

Viewing
This is almost never done right. How you watch the films is almost as important as what films you watch. I’ve had two completely different opinions of a film when I’ve watched them under different screening circumstances. There are films that seemed to have no chance when I first watched them, only to have them become obvious hits once I rewatched them with the rest of the committee on a really big tv.

Ideal Conditions
All the Committee is there at once
Each session consists of a solid number of films each gathering
The shorts are shown on a large screen
The shorts are screened in the format that they will eventually be shown to the public on.

I seriously doubt all of these conditions have ever been met by any festival. Too typically, the conditions more resemble the worst-case scenario

Worst Conditions
Each member of the committee watches alone
Each member watches one or two films whenever they have a spare chunk of time
The shorts are watched on a small tv
The shorts are viewed off VHS screeners

The ideal conditions will most resemble the actual screening in all its forms. Watching one or two shorts at a time doesn’t give you a fair concept of how any of the shorts will fare when put into program. The larger the screen, the more real the impact, as I’ve seen many shorts, especially shorts shot digitally, that have played well on small screens but fail at the larger size. The format issue will always be there, at least as long as people keep making movies on 35.
A fair compromise is the weekly meeting. Having folks get together once a week to watch 3 or 4 hours of shorts at once is a good idea, especially as it helps gel the committee and gives each short an audience, which magnifies the faults and fairnesses of every film. The closer the committee becomes in viewing, the better the results of the final program.

What Each Member Should Do While Viewing
The keeping of a journal or a spreadsheet is of utmost importance, and it’s also the one thing I almost never do. Having a record to look back on for justification is really important. There are festivals that include a slip with each film, allowing members to write short notes that the other members can add to or comment on. It’s a smart method, but it doesn’t allow for a lot to say. Reading these notes beforehand can also influence the new viewer, either turning them off to or over-hyping a short. My take is that it gives a quick crib that each member can view for themselves.
The other advantage to keeping a notebook is in future years. Seeing a memorable name or face could make a short look more attractive to a committee. Many large festival programming teams who have a separate shorts selection committee get very angry when a former Best Live-Action Short Oscar nominee doesn’t have his film invited because it was nearly in, but no one recognized the name.

The Argument Time
After a few months of viewing, it’s time to select. The most important meeting that any selection team will have is the one after all the entries have been viewed. Getting everyone together with a full list is the only way that trends will become apparent. Once you’ve all brought lists and the comparisons are made, the usual number is between ten and twenty films that have made just about everyone’s list. Those are the easy choices, but the hard ones are the ones that have two or three choices. These end up in a battle I call The Significance Shake-down.

Every film has things going for it and against it once you get beyond the film itself. It is in these areas that you see the politics that go on behind every festival. If a film is great, and everyone agrees that it is great, it’s done, but then ones that have flecks of greatness running through have to fight in the arena of film festival one ups-manship and premiere frenzy. If a film has been at every festival imaginable, it has a good chance of making it in just so the folks who expect these films to be in a fest will be happy. If this is the first fest the filmmakers have submitted to, it also has a better chance. If a film has made it known that it is willing to send the director or a known star, that alone can easily tip the scales. Of course, biases towards local films can take a film that may only have one or two things going for it and get it shown.
Every large festival that runs a shorts program has friends and folks that they want to give a rub to, and these considerations can easily overtake the vision of a selection committee. Too many of these ‘Friend of Festival’ choices and you may as well not have a vision. Too few, and the local film community may think that you don’t care about them. I like to see five percent brought in by the main festival programming committees, as that still allows for the selection committee to feel like they did right and the locals to feel like they are being looked at proper.

At the Festival
Once the battles are over, the committee should be involved in the festival itself, mostly by doing simple things like introducing the series and handling question and answer periods as well as meeting and greeting filmmakers. Interaction with the committee helps in a number of ways. Allowing short filmmakers to feel that they are being given a direct line to the staff of the festival will only help the reputation of the festival itself. Giving an explanation as to why some films are selected and others are not is just as important, as it helps to identify the standards of the festival for future submission considerations.

A shorts program can be a lively force that drives a festival forward, or an albatross dying on a string around your neck. Making the most of your selection committee is of utmost importance, as they can be the best face to put on your festival to a large number of young, waiting-for-the-current-generation-to-die-types If you choose well, give your committee a long leash and make sure they have the right path to start down, you’ll find yourself hosting a shorts program that will draw filmmakers and audiences alike.

Christopher J. Garcia is a writer, historian and filmmaker from Campbell, California. He has been working on short films for more than a decade and helping program shorts for festivals since the mid-nineties.
Christopher J. Garcia