Irrelevant But Awesome

If you happened to watch our first short film  "Taker Taken!"  last month, you might have noticed a message at the end of the credits that read "#ForceJoelToMakeBallin2" and was a nudge to IBA's Joel to finally make a short that we had been discussing for years. Well the social media campaign worked and tugged at Joel's heartstrings. Ballin 2 begins shooting this weekend! But a lot of you might be thinking "Well, that's fine and all but what is Ballin?" I'm glad you asked, made-up person. Ballin was a short film done back in 2009 by members of the IBA family as part of the 48 Hour Film Festival. And to celebrate the forthcoming sequel, we've re-uploaded the original short which you can watch below: (NSFW Language Warning)

This week's short film takes the idea of an unreliable narrator to the extreme. Set in an old western town, we get a Stranger Than Fiction like scenario where the film's narrator can be heard by the characters in the movie. This is a narrator that can see the thought process and motivations of each character and is happy to tell the audience like a good narrator should, but causes chaos in the story that he is narrating. As an added bonus, Nick Offerman of Parks and Recreation fame is the voice of The Narrator. Check it out below.

E. Lilian Todd was an inventor in the early 1900s. She has been credited as being the first woman to ever design an airplane. You can read more about her on her Wikipedia page. But this week's short film is about her. It's an animated musical detailing her life as a woman trying to make it as an inventor in the early part of the 20th century. The animation is flat out beautiful on this short and it's staggering how such simplistic animation is able to convey such strong, heartfelt emotion. Check out the short below.

Most of the time a time machine movie is about traveling back to a monumental time in history to see a dinosaur or to kill Hitler. Or maybe it's about traveling to the distant future to see what the world would be like hundreds of years from now. But in this little six minute video, take a look at what you might  be able to do with a time machine that lets you travel a mere one minute into the past. Short, fun, silly, it's a great little short.

Last year, a webcomic titled We Go Forward was released that detailed a very interesting look a the life inside of a sidescrolling video game. Now, with the approval of the original creator, YouTuber pipocaVFX has recreated the story in this wonderful little short film. It doesn't take much to get that lump in your throat with something like this. Check it out below, and check out the original webcomic .

Welcome to the first installment of Short Film of the Week, where we select a short from somewhere on the internet that you can check out for free. For our initial installment, we're looking at the fan film Predator: Dark Ages.  Set in the universe of the Predator movies (can you believe there are five of those?) this fan film takes place hundreds of years before any of the official movies back in the middle ages. Apparently Predators have been coming to earth to hunt humans for hundreds of years. It's worth checking out the movie for its Predator effects which are pretty impressive for a fan film.

The tale of how Black Angel got to this point is an amazing one. Back in the late 70s Star Wars art director, Roger Christian directed a 25-minute short about a medieval knight who must free a mysterious, beautiful maiden from her capture, The Black Angel. The movie was played before a few screenings of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 but then, nothing. The movie was never released on any home format or screened in a theater again. The original negatives of the short were lost, making Black Angel a lost film. All that remainded was the memories of a handful of people who swore they saw a fantasy short before The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Then in 2011 a 35mm copy of the negative was found by an archivist in LA. The previously lost film was painstakingly restored and on May 12th, it was uploaded in it's entirity to YouTube. You can watch it here. But that's not all. On June 2nd, it was announced that a full feature lengh version of Black Angel is in the works. Ro...