DC Shorts Blog
Judge Training
They came, they saw, they learned how to judge. If you’re interested in the numbers of things, we had some 109 volunteers in the U.S. Navy Memorial Burke Theater to learn how to judge shorts for the festival.
No, they won’t be holding up cards with a potential of a perfect 10 score, shorts are not something you stick or miss. They are instead judged by a number of factors including acting, technical details and script. 109 attentive pairs of eyes watched DC Shorts Director Jon Gann lay down the ground rules for how to laugh, cry, or perish the thought, roll their eyes with a short.
Judges were divided into 36 groups of three apiece, based on geography and the notoriously difficult to synchronize availability. A number of practice shorts were screened and ‘judged’ with a discussion to follow on what to do and what not to do in waxing eloquent on the trials and tribulations of any given short the judges will watch.
Serving more than just sight and sound, volunteers also tasted and smelled 150 burritos, cookies, brownies and chips from Chinatown’s eternally tasty California Tortilla. Since the judges were certainly holding information sheets and sitting in chairs, I guess that means DC Shorts services all 5 senses, but M. Night Shyamalan is a feature length guy so I guess no Sixth Sense.
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Reviewed films were randomly selected from the hundreds of entries to the 2009 DC Shorts Film Festival. The reviews are written by Bryan Koenig, an intern with an interest in film review and journalism. The opinions expressed are his own, and not that of the independent judging panel, the DC Shorts Film Festival staff, or the staff and Board of the DC Film Alliance.
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