On the first day of the L.A. leg, the tour swung by agency ICM. Due to another special Irish screening Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty's director Nicky Phelan and producer Darragh O'Connell couldn't make the event, but The Lady and the Reaper's director Javier Recio Gracia, producer Raul Garcia, and exec producer Enrique Posner were on hand.
More than a dozen agents showed up to watch the nominated films. Agent Craig Bernstein said that agents look at shorts to find the next hot filmmaker. They want to see that a filmmaker can tell a story with a beginning, middle and end in a short period of time. This shows a real solid understanding of story. One of the agency's success stories is hooking Oscar-nominated student filmmaker Shane Acker up with the deal to transform his short 9 in a feature.
After the screening in chatting with the agents, Raul said that in Spain they have to make their films in English because it makes it much easier to get international distribution. Right now Kandor's productions cost around $30 million, but still need to compete with the Pixar and DreamWorks films with budgets five times the size.