My short film "Juno & Sensei" finally went live online. Got picked up by Motionographer (the motion design bible for 15+ years), Stash, and onepointfour. Brilliant, right? Validation from the exact publications I've been reading since I was a wee junior After Effects bunny, back when render times gave you an excuse to go to the pub.

But let's talk numbers, shall we? Because I'm nothing if not a masochist with a spreadsheet.

The Vimeo Reality Check

The full film on Vimeo? 16:9, high resolution, the way it was meant to be seen - complete with that dystopian magic hour lighting I nearly fell off a hotel roof to capture? 429 views. 324 unique viewers. Average watch time: 98 seconds. That's 22% of the film. Only 25 people made it to the end.

Twenty. Five. People.

I spent more time arguing with Cinema4D's cloth sim to get Jorge's shirt looking less "attacked by felines" than the total minutes all my viewers spent watching the thing.

The Festival Circuit: A Different Story

Now, to be fair, the film did get selected for some lovely festivals - Nederlands Film Festival, Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, Munich Film Awards, MOVING BODY Festival, Shortcutz Amsterdam, ADCN Awards, 1.4 Awards, Mecal Barcelona, OnArt Dance&Music Festival. Watching it on a proper cinema screen with an actual audience? Magic. Pure magic.

There's something about people sitting in the dark, committed to watching the whole thing because, well, that's what you do in a cinema. You can't scroll away. You can't check your notifications. You're trapped - in the best possible way - with the story unfolding in front of you. That's what the medium was designed for.

The Numbers Game: Then vs Now

But here's where it gets properly interesting. My previous short "Zwart" from 2020 - had 22 festival selections out of 98 submissions. Four award wins. Two finalist positions. Roughly a 22% selection rate.

"Juno & Sensei"? 6 selections out of 43 submissions. About 14% initially. And significantly fewer shiny trophies gracing my mantelpiece.

Now before you think this is me having a proper sulk about my brilliant masterpiece being ignored - well, maybe 3% that. But mostly I'm genuinely fascinated by what this tells us about where we are now. Five years is nothing in cinema time, but it's an eternity in internet years.

The Slamdance Perspective

I'm currently on the jury for Slamdance - one of the biggest short film festivals in the States - and I can't tell you the exact number of submissions we're watching through, but let's just say it's "makes you question your life choices-inducing."

Sitting through hundreds of short films gives you a very particular kind of existential crisis. Every single one represents months, sometimes years, of someone's creative life. Location scouts, casting calls, sleepless nights writing, arguments about whether that transition works, compromise after compromise until you've got something you're willing to show the world.

And watching through this avalanche, I keep thinking: we're all little fish in an increasingly overcrowded pond. Over-sat-ur-ated. The word needs hyphens for emphasis at this point.

Everyone's making films. Everyone's got a camera. Everyone's got access to the same tools I'm using - hell, half of them are free. Unreal Engine doesn't ask if you've got a budget before letting you download it. Blender costs nothing. You can 3D scan someone with your phone now. The democratization of filmmaking tools is brilliant for democracy and absolutely terrible for my festival acceptance rate.

The Instagram Paradox

And here's the proper mindfuck: while 25 people watched the full film on Vimeo, those 50-second Instagram clips I butchered up? Tens of thousands of views. 10,000ths accounts reached. The algorithm gods smiled upon me.

People engaged. They tapped that little heart. They even - and this is the bit that gets me - saved it to watch later. (They won't watch it later. We both know they won't watch it later. But the gesture is nice.)

So I've got this weird situation where the deconstructed, decontextualized fragments of my film are more "successful" than the actual thing. It's like spending months baking an intricate seven-layer cake, only to find people prefer licking the spatula.

The Toilet-Scroll Economy

And then those films go online and the maths gets even more brutal. People with laptops open, "working," spending four hours a day scrolling through their phones - they're not opening Vimeo. They're not clicking through to watch a 7-minute short film. They're looking for that dopamine hit between spreadsheets. Or, let's be honest, whilst on the toilet.

They won't sit down for 7 minutes. Seven minutes requires commitment. Seven minutes requires you to actually stop doing the other three things you're pretending to do simultaneously. Seven minutes is basically asking someone to meditate in this economy.

The Existential Question

So what's the play here? Chop everything into vertical 9:16 clips? Feed the beast? Make films specifically for people mid-scroll, mid-shit?

Maybe. Probably.

But here's what's doing my head in: we spent months crafting something meant to be experienced as a whole. The pacing builds. The world unfolds. Sensei's toxic mentorship and wounded pride is revealed through Jorge's dancing, through those 3D-scanned statues of himself, through the way the light shifts when he retreats into his own head.

You can't get that from a 50-second clip. You can get a vibe. You can get "ooh, pretty visuals." You can get enough to tap a heart and keep scrolling. But you can't get the story. You can't get what I was actually trying to say about masculine fragility and the way we build monuments to our past selves.

The Overcrowded Pond

The problem is, we're all waiting to be discovered. Sitting in our overcrowded pond, making our little films, hoping some producer will fish us out and let us make features. But what if no one's actually fishing anymore? What if all the producers are also on their phones, scrolling through reels whilst on the toilet?

The traditional path was: make shorts, get into festivals, get noticed, get funded, make features. But that was predicated on people actually watching shorts. And I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

The Uncomfortable Truth

I'm not saying the internet is dead. But it's definitely unwell. And I think we're all complicit in its declining health, myself included.

We've built ourselves into a corner where making anything longer than a minute is essentially shouting into the void while the void scrolls past looking for something else to tickle your brain. And the terrifying thing is, I don't know if this is reversible.

Can you un-train an entire generation to have longer attention spans? Can you compete with infinite scroll when you're asking for seven minutes of someone's finite existence? Is it even worth trying?

Maybe It Is

But maybe - and I'm just thinking out loud here - those 25 people who watched it all the way through on Vimeo got more out of it than the 5,400 who saw a 50-second clip. Maybe attention is becoming more valuable than reach. Maybe we need to stop optimizing for the scroll and start designing for the few who'll actually sit still.

Or maybe I'm just coping with my festival rejection rate and trying to feel better about catastrophically low view counts.

The Future of Short Films

So what do we do? Keep making shorts and hoping for the best? Cut everything up into bite-sized pieces? Give up and get a proper job? (Ha, imagine.)

I don't have the answer. But I do know this: those festival screenings, where people actually sat and watched the whole thing - those felt like the film worked. Those felt like I'd built something worth building.

And maybe that's enough. Maybe in 2025, getting 25 people to watch your short film all the way through is actually a massive achievement. Maybe we need to redefine success in an age where everyone's making everything and no one's watching anything.

Or maybe - and this is the optimist in me talking - maybe we just need to get better at building doors. Doors so compelling that people actually want to walk through them, even when they've got infinite hallways to scroll through instead.

Closing

Anyway. "Juno & Sensei" is online here on this site if you fancy being one of the 26th person to watch it through. No pressure. I know you've got reels to scroll. Or watch it on tomgera.com where I've collected all my work for you to ignore at your leisure.

And if you make it to the end? You're one of the weird ones. Welcome to the club.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some shorts to judge for Slamdance. Hundreds of them. Send help.

Or at least coffee. Probably whiskey.

The Dead Internet Theory, or: What I Learned Releasing a Short Film in 2025