A Real Audience

Short videos that I directed have been seen by tens of thousands of people online in recent years, but it has been a very long time since my work was screened to a real audience.

This past weekend, my short, End of the Story, was screened at the Beverly Hills Shorts Festival. I attended the screening, and was particularly interested in hearing the audience response. The short (all 160-seconds of it) has the setup-and-punchline structure of a comedy, superimposed on a thriller-type narrative. It's a very short study in tension-and-release.

And it worked! The audience gave the short a very warm reception -- they laughed when I intended for them to laugh, and seemed to appreciate the journey for both its clarity and brevity. BHSF is the film's first festival -- we're still waiting to hear from a number of others -- but now that I've seen an audience respond to it, I feel quite satisfied that we've done a good job, and quite confident that it'll screen elsewhere in the coming months.

-Arnon