The Long and Short of It

After I watched this, I had a big smile on my face. It's only about five minutes long, but it brings across an important message that should be around more where I am. It's about when a 'grizzled painters' trying to paste a poster up on the wall, but his ladders broken and he's struggling to get it up properly. Then a 3 1/2 foot tall woman and an 8 foot man help him. Just imagine a place where everybody stretched out there empty hands to help other people. It's inspiring. I love Sean Astin's acting and I hope he goes further with directing. It's exactly like what happened to make this, cast and crew working on the Lord of the Rings giving up their spare time to help. It's great! 10/10

This is a wonderful little short about cooperation. The direction is great. Sean took a very simple approach, not a lot of angles, just letting the simple story and setting come out. It seems like it was done simply as a fun diversion while filming the epic Lord of the Rings, and illustrating on a small level what all those involved learned. Watch for Peter Jackson's cameo. And be sure to read the credits. Some are just plain funny! All in all, a fun short film, that proves that Sean Astin has the instinct to become a great director, if he wants to.

Nice little film with the message of helping each other out in a hard situation. You can almost touch the friendly and sympathetic atmosphere. Visually, it wasn't that special but still you can see that there's much more professional film crew behind it than with your average short films. And I think the music suits this one well. Of course we wouldn't know of this if it wasn't on the LOTR DVD but it made me smile, maybe even chuckle a bit and that's enough. Worth watching it again some another time, especially as this doesn't really take that much time out of your life.

This is a wonderful short by immerging filmmaker Sean Astin. Made on their days off while shooting Lord of the Rings in New Zealand it makes use of the lesser seen crew members in a gentle and simple story about a man in a spot of bother who is helped by some passersby. I absolutely love the idea that Elijah Wood is First Assistant Director and Andy Serkis is Assistant Location Manager.

To me this is really about the spirit of Peter Jackson's trilogy and the bonds that were formed. It's just a really sweet and endearing little film with some astonishly big names attached to it.

It was a typical weekend in Wellington, New Zealand when Sean Astin borrowed a camera or two from the "Lord of the Rings" set to shoot a short film he had written.

This is hardly on the scale of "The Lord of the Rings" - especially when one considers that it was made with some materials borrowed from the epic for one afternoon. Nevertheless, it is a very nice short film that is well worth five minutes of anyone's time.

I found the making of documentary to be quite humorous, with Andy Serkis describing his plot - even more insidiously evil than Gollum's plan to steal the One Ring - to rise through the ranks of the production crew :).

I would give this film four out of five, with the fifth star always being reserved for the films that are unspeakably wondrous, so there's no shame in not getting it, especially as small a picture as this.