The Long and Short of It

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.

When I saw The long and short of it I was feeling a little bit down but after the screening I felt A lot better. It's this kind of story that gives you A warm feeling inside, and we all can use some more of this. The story itself is simple, and the moral after it is good. It shows that if we all work together we can achieve almost everything. I hope to see more of this kind of movie's.

I heard that Sean was making a short film for the Two Towers DVD, and I was excited to see how it would turn out. And it was really good! It was cool that he used the three people of varying heights to accomplish the goal, and that he used Peter Jackson as the bus driver. That's awesome! The music on it was cool. And I also thought the fact that they didn't talk was cool too. Watch the making of "The Long and Short of It" on the DVD, too. It is really funny! I hope Sean makes some more short films, or maybe he'll be a director someday. Anyway, congratulations on your first film, Sean. Good luck in the future.

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.

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.