Once in a while you stumble across something what blows your mind. I’m normally not patient enough for watching movies on the internet. And nowadays where everyone thinks just because he can shoot with a DSLR and put some music around it he is doing documentary, most of the stuff is looking nice, but has no storytelling value. It reminds me that craft comes first, not the tools. Cinema is not great because it looks great, but because it tells great stories. And stories are what drives me in my work. And it drives me to get better in telling them, in all aspects, what also includes the beautiful look of DSLR film, where i hope it will bring a new future to documentary film and also multimedia productions. We just have to learn to use it right. Depth of field is not the only value and only another tool, what could help us to tell stories. Anyway, a good example for great storytelling, great use of the different tools, we can use to tell the story from audio to depth of field, is brought to us by the folks at the project ‘California is a place.’. This stuff is amazing. And everyone can learn from it, for sure.

Cannonball is one of the four great shortfilms online right now. I love the slow, but at the same time so engaging storytelling at the start. You only see pictures, but the sound does the trick, creating a picture in our minds before we see it. Then we hear a voice from the off talking about the empty pools. It takes one minute till we get the first hints that it’s about skating pools and it’s not before minute two that we actually see the first skater. That is a lot of time for a internet video. The whole atmosphere is really meditative, but at the same time the story is slowly developing, no breaks. At minute five they actually start to skate, short before the end of the film. But still you feel like as if you watched a film about skating. Just without the skating action being a big part. I can only recommend to you to check the website for the project here for more compelling stories. A must-see.