Ty Cooper defies categorization. As a marketing professional, he’s worked with all manner of companies and in myriad media. As a visual artist, he’s made his mark as an award-winning filmmaker, photographer, and designer.
Perhaps that’s why Cooper is drawn to short films.
“If a person is interested in being a filmmaker, shorts are an easier entry,” Cooper says. “They’re less expensive, and you can be super creative and do things you can’t get away with in a feature film. You can have fun and learn to love filmmaking. It gives [filmmakers] an opportunity to experiment and get better and be as quirky as possible.”
Cooper held his inaugural Indie Short Film Festival, a three-day rumpus of screenings, table reads, and parties in March. He showed nearly 75 shorts, held panel discussions, hosted a screenplay competition, and helped select best-of-show winners—all in four locations centrally located around the Downtown Mall.
The festival was an expansion of Cooper’s long-running short film series—a way to “massage the market,” he says, and get a sense for whether he should keep the festival going annually. After the success of the first event, during which three of the 12 screening blocks were sold out and several others were at greater than 80 percent of capacity, Cooper says he’s planning a second festival for 2025.
“I quantify success not only by looking at the numbers of people coming in—the sold-out screenings—but by going to the panel discussions and seeing the Common House with only a couple seats open and seeing people engaged with the filmmakers,” Cooper says.
To select films, Cooper started his search at Sundance, which he attends every year to see movies and meet filmmakers. Nearly 25 percent of the eventual Indie Short Film Festival playlist came from the renowned Salt Lake City independent film festival. Another 25 percent of the flicks came straight from Virginia, and the rest were selected from other submissions, festival screenings, and foreign films, with at least 11 countries eventually represented.
Cooper has eschewed a themed festival to maximize voices, but he organizes the films for screening blocks. The 2024 festival featured animated blocks, documentaries, Virginia-focused segments, and miscellaneous narrative blocks. It included films by people of color, women, and wide-ranging ethnic representatives. The panel discussions took on topics like women in film and the Black experience in American cinema.
“Part of my goal is to put all these voices on the screen,” Cooper says. “It was a melting pot.”
Cooper, whose marketing and branding firm Lifeview Marketing and Visuals counts the Virginia Film Festival among its clients, says his 2025 event will be bigger and better than his first foray. After polling attendees about their experiences, he says he’ll implement changes large and small. “I talk to every single person I see with their lanyard swinging,” Cooper says.
The 2025 Indie Short Film Festival will be held March 21–23 at various theaters and restaurants around the Downtown Mall.