The shorts, as shorts tend to do, varied wildly in length, subject matter, and quality -- but we did enjoy Samara Halperin's , a stop-motion Lego animation of a risque construction site (pictured above, which also had excellent music). We also found ourselves drawn into the soap-opera-like Homotopia (denoting the sellout gay bad guy in the movie with a NEWSOM t-shirt was a nice touch, we thought).

Even in the YouTube age, there's something very cool about watching short-length films on a big screen. The excitement of the filmmakers was palpable, and it's great to see we've got so much different types of talent in the area. We were hoping for more shots of the city in the movies, but we basically always think that for anything set in San Francisco.

Hard Hat Required