In an age of tweets and texts, cellphone novels and films created with iPhones, it seems that short is in vogue, at least when it comes to technology-enabled communications and artistic expression.

Perhaps it’s the fast pace of our lives these days. Everyone’s so busy. No one seems to have any time.

Or, maybe it’s the easy and affordable access people now have to the technology. With just the expense of a smartphone, anyone can make a film, particularly a short film, right?

For these, and other reasons, the creators of Vine would certainly like to think that short is the latest new thing.

With just 2.5 million viewers during it’s third and final season on the CW Network, VERONICA MARS, a TV series about a young female sleuth and her detective father, was cancelled in 2007.

The audience might have been too small to justify the show’s renewal to Warner Brothers, the rights’ holder, but it’s  passion was anything but. More like a cult following, fans of the series soon began to clamor for VERONICA MARS, the movie.

The studio passed on the idea, but series creator, Rob Thomas, and star, Kristen Bell, with Warner Brother’s permission, decided to launch a VERONICA MARS Kickstarter campaign  to try to raise the necessary production funds themselves. And, the fans responded in spades.

According to Adam Leipzig, film and theatre producer, writer, Cultural Weekly’s Publisher and former executive at Disney and National Geographic, a perfect storm has developed from the collision of new technologies, new business models, and new creative talent and it’s creating a new Golden Age in cinema.

A sign of the digital times, YouTube made a bit of a splash in Venice this year by awarding the first prize at the world’s oldest film festival. Not exactly front and center, but, still, the sidelines count for something, which is where YouTube announced the winner of Your Film Festival, its inaugural online competition for short films, spearheaded by director Ridley Scott and designed to find and foster new talent.

Just when VOD has settled into the lexicon, along comes TOD.

What is TOD you may ask?

As Scott Glosserman, filmmaker and founder of Gathr,

which launched in March 2012, sees it,

INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival where it won the award for best editing in the World Documentary Competition.

It’s the story of four struggling independent game designers, Phil Fish, Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, and Johnathan Blow, and the three games, Fez, Super Meat Boy, and Braid, they fought tooth and nail to create.

It’s also the story of two independent filmmakers from Winnipeg,

Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky,

and how they’ve used the internet to bring their feature-length documentary to life in the digital age.

The Tribeca Online Film Festival

is back for its third year.

Jeff Koenig, founder of OMFGeek, has a plan.

In the past, he’s been behind the development of a number of web series.

Now he’s using the crowd funding site, Mobcaster, to raise funds for a pilot for an independent scifi/comedy series called Drifter.

What’s different this time?

Kenton Bartlett, director, writer, producer, is 23 years old. He wrote MISSING PIECES, a suspenseful, romantic comedy, when he was 19. Three and half years later his film is finished.

Total budget: $80,000.

Length:  117 minutes.

Cast:  includes Mark Boone Junior (Memento, Batman Begins, Se7en) and Melora Walters (Magnolia, Dead Poet’s Society, Butterfly Effect)

How did Bartlett, a young, unknown working on his first film, do it?

It’s not too late to view and vote!

The first-ever PBS Online Film Festival

doesn’t conclude its five week run

until March 30th.