It's that time again – a selection of short films from this year's Sundance Film Festival are available on YouTube. Here's the link to the full playlist of the 2014 films that are available online.
I quite like the one above, Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns, not because I'm particularly in favor of legalized hand cannons, but because it's a great example of what you can do with a film in just a couple of minutes -- and then play the most coveted festival in the land. It's all about story, even if it's just a snippet of everyday life.
Tim and Susan is presented by Saddleback Leather, which also has this great quasi-infomercial, How To Knock Off A Bag, in which Saddleback proprietor Dave Munson goes into great detail to reveal the secrets of Saddleback knock-off artists. Basically, it's an instructional video on how not to make a quality bag, which of course just happens to mention the ways in which Saddleback's bags are superior. Don't miss Dave's blog entry on the company's commitment to making great corporate videos, which (according to Munson) they've been working at for the last eight years.
In 2006, just after Youtube started up, I still wasn’t very good at video but that didn’t bother me. I’m not good at a lot of things. But we got a video of sharks swimming around a briefcase on our honeymoon in Bora Bora. A few months later, we filmed the same briefcase being attacked by a crocodile in Australia.
In 2007, I invested in a big fancy video camera that even used HD tapes. I only knew how to turn it on and off and zoom, but it sure was pretty. We took it to Jamaica and filmed a real nice dreadlocked man demonstrating how to convert a briefcase into a backpack. And we just kept getting better.
I don't know if I'll ever spend upwards of $500 on a leather shoulder bag (I'm more of a Crumpler guy), but I will definitely be keeping an eye on Saddleback Leather for new movies to watch.
