Four Exquisite Shorts and One Comedy: Watch SXSW 2010 Bumpers

You never know what you might get with film festival bumpers -- the very short films that appear before each fest screening to promote the festival. The problem is, you have to watch the things all week long. You might end up with a horrible earworm that infiltrates your dreams for days, or a slickly done ad from a sponsor that is annoying the second time, much less the twenty-second.

The best experience is for a festival to have multiple bumpers -- Fantastic Fest has so many that you rarely see one more than twice -- which should be short, interesting as films rather than as ads and perhaps even quotable. By the end of the fest, people are going to be shouting back at the ads a la Rocky Horror. The SXSW 2008 Burger Hut ads were great for audience participation (I still hear people quoting the Glengarry Glen Ross spoof), for example.

This year's SXSW Film Festival bumpers were generally not quotable -- most were almost silent -- but I never grew tired of them. Four of the five were directed by David Lowery, who brought his feature St. Nick to SXSW last year. Lowery, who hails from the DFW area, also was director of photography for two features at this year's fest, Audrey the Trainwreck and Lovers of Hate.

Lowery's shorts are lovely and strange -- film critic James Rocchi described them during the fest as "Nietzsche's Playmobil set," "Lego Werner Herzog" and "the music boxes of sadness." I think he'd seen them several times when he made those comments. I actually caught only three of them during the fest, so I'm very happy that all four shorts are now available online via YouTube. In addition, if you visit Lowery's blog, Drifting, you can find a "making of" short for one of the bumpers, as well as some storyboard illustrations.

The fifth bumper has been called the "SXSW Midnight" bumper, but I saw it several times during SXSW this year, and as you know, I am usually too wussy for midnight movies. It was made by Joe Nicolosi, whose short Star Wars: Retold screened before The People vs. George Lucas at SXSW this year. The SXSW website has an article about Nicolosi's very funny bumper. It is so full of details that it's still entertaining the third or fourth time.

Here are all five shorts -- I'm not sure how well they'll play back-to-back. You might want to watch Nicolosi's before sitting down to a nice horror movie, for example. Enjoy!

Sewing (David Lowery):

Soundstage (David Lowery):

Music Box (David Lowery):

Flaming Head (David Lowery):

Midnight Bumper (Joe Nicolosi):