There are some 25 shots for the short Hole in the Paper Sky, including this closing image, which is used on the one sheet. All Hole images © Iron Ocean Films.

Spectacular effects are often associated with blockbuster movies, but vfx are also being effectively used in artful, personal short films. In fact, shorts often provide film-makers with the opportunity to explore unusual themes and unique visual presentations. In addition, many of these shorts are finding an audience beyond festival screening rooms -- on the Internet.

Three shorts that feature well-crafted vfx -- sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle -- are Hole in the Paper Sky, Terminus and Little Minx Exquisite Corpse: Come Wander With Me.

In April, Hole in the Paper Sky, from actor/producer Jessica Biel and director Bill Purple won the Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film and Best Screenplay at the 8th Annual International Beverly Hills Film Festival (BHFF). Such awards indicate how shorts can have big impact.

"Short films serve two purposes," says Purple. "First, they offer a canvas to stretch the medium, experiment and break the rules, without investing a ton of money. Second, they allow a story that is not feature length to be told… ones that are better suited to a shorter length."

Paper Chase
In Hole in the Paper Sky, Jason Clarke stars as Howard, a misanthropic math whiz and chess buff who is full of contempt for the world. Howard does not suffer fools gladly, and that includes pretty much everyone -- especially the old coot (Garry Marshall) who offers him no real competition in a chess tournament.

When Howard needs work-study money, the only place his advisor (Stephen Collins) can find any is in a research lab. The shy and sensitive lab technician (Biel) tries to keep him from snooping around their research.

"Hole in the Paper Sky is about a life-long student who eventually forms a bond with a dog. He walks a path with the dog, and all of the [research] papers seem to take the same path," explains Erik Gamache, the film's vfx director.

Gamache, who has faced vfx and animation challenges at Digital Domain on such big-budget movies as Speed Racer, Stealth and I, Robot, had just five weeks to complete the vfx for the film, and he used Maya -- learning procedural animation on the fly. "I hadn't done a lot of procedural animation," he adds, "and I used different effects in Maya. I had toyed with them but never explored to this extent."

Vfx helped the dog close its eyes for one scene in Hole in the Paper Sky.

Gamache notes that this was very much director Purple's project "with zero budget." "He was asking favors to get this film done in time for Sundance," he offers.

Gamache believes that creating a great-looking movie on a short film budget is worth the time and talent invested. "This was a collaborative effort," Gamache continues. "It's rewarding to work with people that you really enjoy, whenever you can."

Hole in the Paper Sky runs 34 minutes, and while it required some vfx 25 shots, Gamache says, "It's not a vfx film; it's very story driven." Still, convincing vfx were needed to animate the papers, create sky replacement and help the dog close his eyes in an important scene.

"When I was reading the script, I came across a scene where there were a bunch of papers flying around," Purple adds. "It wasn't practical or time-effective to do locations shots, so we did plates. I have a production background, having worked on films like Spider-Man and xXx, so I knew how to shoot plates. But I really didn't know how we were going to accomplish the shots."

For that he turned to animator Gamache. "Sky plays a big part in the film… clouds and sunset," Gamache explains. "You can't always capture that on the day of filming. And while the dog was very well trained, we couldn't get him to close his eyes on cue."

In the end, Hole in the Paper Sky was not accepted for Sundance, and Gamache took advantage of that extra time to go back and work some more on the film. "Once you saw the shots on the big screen, you notice things like the motion blur, grain, focus… I put a couple of tweaks to it," he insists.

The film benefited from the additional work, and has been shown at numerous film festivals, including the Newport Beach Film Festival, the Florida Film Festival (Jet Blue Audience Award Winner) and its award-winning turn at BHFF. "The best part about festivals is getting honest opinions and feedback from the public," Purple says.

While Hole in the Paper Sky is not yet playing on the Internet, Purple advises that he has been approached by iTunes as well as the Sundance and IFC web channels, so his short will be reaching a new audience after it has completed its festival run.