Wim Wenders announces winner of Montblanc’s The Beauty of a Second contest
Jan Herms has been named the winner of Montblanc’s The Beauty of a Second short film contest.
The competition – possibly the shortest short film contest in the world – invited entrants to submit a single second of video footage which embodied the beauty and fragility of a moment.
Montblanc don’t actually say which of his entries Jan Herms won for (as far as I can tell) but looking at the three I can find on the site I would have picked Monumental Night With Moving Stars as objectively his best.
Still from Jan Herms' Monumental Night With Moving Stars
EDIT: Apparently I picked right – scroll down for an interesting response to the choice in the comments which picks out some of the issues raised by the competition. From a personal point of view, the fact that a time lapse of more than a second’s worth of footage won does strike me as going against the spirit of the contest. I was kind of hoping I was wrong and that maybe it was the real-time clip of an owl turning its head.
Yes, you guessed right. The contest website now shows this video as the winner. It’s an impressive scene. Quite obviously time lapse can be used to make the confines of one second more “interesting”.
Yet in keeping with the idea of the contest (i.e. showing the beauty that lies in a second of time) I would argue that any time lapse movie would kind of disqualify itself.
On the other hand I think Wim Wenders hands were tied by the contest rules: he could only chose from within the 90 different seconds that “users” had previously voted (enough) for. This selection was weirdly shabby, dominated by the few submitters who got their self-votes working. That there was much more interesting material is exemplified by the beautiful winning playlist that uses almost none of the “shortlisted” seconds.