Virgin Media Shorts is fun online competition out of the UK that just finished up its third year. Sponsored by the giant Branson-lead conglomerate in collaboration with the ubiquitous UK Film Council, the event’s tagline is “Championing Undiscovered Talent”. It does so by providing an online platform for viewers to watch 12 shortlisted films culled from thousands of submissions, then placing those 12 films in limited-screening at 214 theaters across the UK, and finally by backing up that effort with an impressive marketing push that sees the company take out full promo sections in major UK papers. All this culminated with a star-studded gala event last Tuesday where the winners were announced.

My impression is that the ambition of the organizers often exceeds the quality of the productions, but part of that is surely the limits of the contest—films must weigh in under 2 minutes 20 seconds, which is a a real limitation on the type of stories you can tell. Still we thought highly enough of last year’s winner, Mixtape, to feature it on the site, and one can’t argue that 30 mins to watch the entire cast of short-listed films is nice.

This year’s winner is a film called Sign Language, a cute film about an enthusiastic sign-holder or “Static Outdoor Information Technician” as he terms himself, who happens to be smitten with the cute pamphlet-distributor working on his block. The audience winner is Bus Baby, a rather unsettling take on the talking baby formula. My personal favorites were Probably… and Blind Luck. So if interested those four are a good place to start. Nothing earth-shattering, but enjoyable films that explore the ultra-short format that we don’t often feature on the site.

Visit: Virgin Media Shorts