Twenty-one-year-old Kyle Walcott is a good example of how, by small steps, one can achieve big things.
For a couple of years in secondary school, during the long vacation and on weekends, he worked as a projectionist at MovieTowne Tobago. A film would come in parts packed in canisters, and it was Walcott's job to link those parts into one presentation and beam it down onto the large screen before an eager audience.
Today, instead of showing movies, Walcott, now a film student at UWI, is making them. What's more, he's nominated for two awards at the T&T Film Festival, best short documentary and best local short documentary, for Glass Bottom Boat, a touching look at an American woman who finds love in Tobago.
"I can't say it was a labour of love. It was just excessive labour," Walcott said of putting together just 15 minutes of filmmaking.
Shooting and editing a film of any length is a challenge, but short films are the easiest way for emerging filmmakers and filmmakers with limited resources to showcase and draw attention to their craft.
This year the film festival will be showing 68 short films made in the Caribbean or by Caribbean filmmakers. Twenty-five of those films were made in T&T or by T&T filmmakers. It's just about the same number as last year and considerably more than the number of feature films from local filmmakers–there are four of those this year.
"It is difficult, it is costly to do feature-length films, so that's why there is more emphasis on shorts," said festival founder/director Bruce Paddington in an interview with Sunday Arts last year.
The hope is that short films help directors build the experience and support to eventually do longer films.
"You have to learn how to use film to tell a story successfully, and a short film is a great way to teach that, and it does not have the huge financial and logistical challenges that you face to make a large film," said filmmaker and outgoing chair of the T&T Film Co Christopher Laird.
Ryan Khan, whose nine-minute dark drama How Many Times? is up for two awards–best short narrative and best local short narrative–said producing short films can be "a sort of time filler that keeps your filmmaking 'muscle' primed and ready".
But, he added, some directors are satisfied with just producing short films. YouTube and other online sites can help you earn money from short films alone.
"I know lots of global filmmakers who haven't made a feature and are making a living off of the short form of film, much like how a columnist writer does," he said.
"However," he added. "I guess for both writers and filmmakers, the reason you got into the industry was because of the love for the long form, ie, novel or feature film. That's where my heart resides."
Khan directed the psychedelic video for Kes the Band's 2012 hit Stress Away, which was shown at the BBC Music Video Festival that year. Another one of his shorts, The Midnite Affair, was part of a portmanteau called Dark Tales from Paradise that opened the T&T Film Festival in 2010. How Many Times? was screened at the Short Film Corner of the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Still, "Are you working on a feature?" is a question Khan gets often.
"I've been asked many times over the years and still have none to show yet. The answer will always be 'yes'. Right now it's a zombie comedy," he said.
Walcott's projectionist job led to other opportunities in the industry, including working as a production assistant on Michael Mooleedhar's short film The Cool Boys. He then organised a team at Bishop's High School in Tobago, where he was a student, to submit an entry to the Secondary Schools Short Film Festival. They won the Tobago Award.
Glass Bottom Boat was the final project for a course on documentary filmmaking. His lecturers and classmates encouraged him to submit it for the film festival, which began last week and wraps up at the end of the month.
He hopes to open his own production company to facilitate filmmaking in T&T. He currently has no ambition to make any feature films of his own except one.
"I want to work on the team that does the film adaptation of Green Days by the River," he said.
"Throughout my high school life that was one of the books that really stood out to me."