We passionately believe in the medium of short film and its creativity, giving filmmakers the opportunity to experiment, learn and come up with innovative ideas. Our company was set up to create the most important audience and community around short film, creating a culture of experiencing a showcase of films in a social thinking environment. The Internet brings people together in communal spaces to watch films and create a dialogue around them. This is what filmmakers want. This is what audiences want.

Today, we're curating the YouTube homepage with films from Future Shorts ONE, a new global event launching on Saturday, November 6. In the video below, we talk about why we chose these films to represent ONE, along with some information on the event:

ONE takes place in 12 countries and 50 cities every month, with live simultaneous events that connect thousands of people around the world. Each location showcases the same selection of the world's boldest short films, many of them on YouTube on our channel, alongside the best in local live music, performance and design. To find out if ONE will be near you, click here.

Fabien Riggall, Founder and Creative director, Future Shorts, just watched "The Lost Tribes of New York City"
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Any festival can tell you programming short films is very hard. At AFI Fest, we only have space for about 30 shorts and over 3,000 submissions to choose from. However, this year we didn’t limit ourselves to just submissions. We also travelled to other festivals and looked increasingly to the web as a source for content to curate and showcase.

It’s an incredible experience to find short films and show them in a theater with an audience. Hearing a group of strangers laughing and crying together in the dark is an almost spiritual experience. We are also delighted to showcase as many films from our Official Selections on YouTube as possible. We want to help short filmmakers find audiences in any way we can. YouTube has proven that there are huge audiences out there for this content and it’s our pleasure to help highlight as much as we can, which is why we're happy to be the guest editors of today's homepage.


AFI is also proud to be a YouTube Partner. Our channel has nearly 700 videos that include never-before-seen interviews with Master Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, clips from our annual AFI Life Achievement Award and more. Recently, we started posting a new video every Monday through Friday and the response has been astounding as we’re approaching nearly 2 million views per month.

While AFI is proud to host a prestigious film festival and continues to build a robust YouTube Channel, we are a non-profit organization that relies on a national membership program to help us preserve the history of film, educate the next generation of filmmakers and honor the artists. If you're interested in joining, check out AFI.com/members.

AFI FEST 2010 presented by Audi takes place November 4-11 in Hollywood, California. For more info visit www.afi.com/afifest.

Bob Jennings, Manager, AFI Social Media & Lane Kneedler, Associate Director of Programming, AFI Fest just watched Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
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To help make this dream a reality, we're offering you a pack of snazzy YouTube business cards for next to nothing, thanks to a partnership with MOO.com. For just the price of shipping and handling (about $6/£3/€4/your local currency if you choose standard shipping), you can get 50 high-quality "Watch Me on YouTube" business cards that you can design yourself. On the image side, you can put different thumbnails from your videos, your channel profile icon or a variation on your channel's design -- it's totally up to you. On the details side, you can choose which information you'd like to include (in addition to your channel name or URL) and also add a graphic. Here's an example of what they could look like:


We've put together an FAQ which we recommend you read before starting your order. It also contains links to graphics and badges you can use on your cards and other helpful suggestions.

Once you're ready, click here to order your cards. 

Please note: only one pack per person, and this offer is only until supplies last or until May 21, whichever comes first. 

We also ask that if you order cards, please make a video showing us how they turned out, using the tag "ytmoo" so we can find it. We'd love to highlight some of the most creative cards in our Creator's Corner and on the MOO site, and brag about you generally. 

Feel free to leave a comment below with questions; otherwise, to order your pack, click here.

Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched "Glimpse of Horizon."
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This is a mash-up video of scenes from my film Wild Style. Some clever guys in Amsterdam did this, and I love it.

Here's a scene from the first film/documentary to showcase New York subway graffiti, "Stations of the Elevated," released or finished in 1981. Back then I'm sure this film was not seen by too many. I don't recall it ever airing on TV, but these days, thanks to digital tech and sites like this, we can see what it was like when nearly every New York City subway car was touched by graffiti. I love this film!

As a kid growing up in New York City, when I cut school I'd often visit the various museums, like the Metropolitan and look at art. Here I got familiar with painters like Jackson Pollock and I would notice later how New York graffiti writers tagging on the inside of trains would let the ink drip, reminding me of his work.

My dear friend, Academy Award winning director Jonathan Demme, invited me to be in his film, Rachel Getting Married. You can see me in this trailer, minus my hat, and in the film my scene is a toast I give to the about to be bride and groom at the wedding rehearsal dinner.

"Talking All That Jazz" is a clip I directed for Stetsasonic which is the first video to deal with the soon to be large issue of sampling. Also, because I grew up in a jazz-loving house hold and drummer Max Roach was my godfather, I knew I'd be able to do a good job with this one.

Max Roach, the legendary bee bop jazz drummer, grew up with my dad, and he played jazz often in the house. Max was also my godfather and he really embraced rap music and hip-hop culture from the minute he heard about it. If you search the site you can see a bit performance we did together in the early 80's.

Sharissa's “Ain't No Half Steppin" was a video I directed in 2004.

The first music video I directed was this clip, "My Philosophy," for KRS ONE in the spring of 1988. 

Catch Fab's whole playlist here:


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As we've built these tools directly into YouTube itself, with things like friend suggestions based on your Gmail address book and connecting your YouTube account to social networks via our AutoShare feature, we've started to see people becoming even more social. Some of this activity is hard to quantify -- every day millions of YouTube links are sent via email, IM, Twitter and other communication methods -- but we can tell you that:
  • Over one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader
  • Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com
  • Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature
  • Most Tweeted video yesterday? Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance"
  • More than one million new subscriptions are created every day
We hope these numbers will only rise as we focus on giving you the tools you need to connect with the people who matter most to you. In the process, expect to be entertained and informed by the videos circulating amongst your most trusted friends, subscribers and networks. You can get started today by ensuring that you're discoverable on YouTube (click here and check off "Let others find my channel on YouTube if they have my email address") and by connecting your account to your external networks via AutoShare (click here to set that up).

What do you think "social" on YouTube means, and where would you like to see it go? Leave a comment below.

Brian Glick, Product Manager, recently watched "Michael Jackson - Beat It," and James Phillips, Software Engineer, recently watched "New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less."
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