Lightning Sketches

Paper War

It seemed like just another day at the park for Maggie Simpson. But when Maggie faces playground peril, a heroic young baby whisks her from danger and steals her heart.

A Clarence G. Badger silent cowboy western kidnapping mistaken identity romantic comedy, based on a story by Rex Taylor; about a rich woman who gets lost in the West, and is found by an engineer who she mistakes for an outlaw. tHe plays along because he enjoys it, but then four real outlaws show up, and he tells them he was kidnapping her. They get found out, the girl gets one of the outlaws' guns and rescues them, and of course, they discover they love each other!

Silent boxing sports comedy about a boxer whose grandmother wants him to be a ballet dancer, so he has the boxers at his training camp pose as ballet dancers to fool granny, with predictable results

Three monkeys: what happens when one of them is dead?

Martin has a feeling of emptiness inside and decides to visit a medium. He hopes to get in touch with his dead father...

Eternidade

An abstract computer-generated film. The image is of squares revolving in space around and through each other. Colors and forms multiply and divide against a beautiful symphonic score by George Kleinsinger.

Minha Primeira Memória

Faced with dark-in-your-room monsters, scary sounds and other things that go bump in the night, a child learns to invoke "room noodles" to banish the monsters.

In a city ravaged by war and famine where there is nothing but wreckage and corpses, a bird struggles to find food for its hungry chickens. But nothing is easy as it seems to be.

An organ-grinder is playing beneath the window of a cranky old woman. She objects strenuously. The organ-grinder, egged on by Hooligan, keeps on playing until a policeman appears.

A fight breaks out over a poster.

NEAT AND TIDY (1930) hilarious British Pathe comedy short with wonderful music hall comics. Newlyweds are old by the time their house is built.

Silent military propaganda film by Erkki Karu, later followed by the musical revue film Meidän poikamme merellä ("Our Boys at Sea", 1933) and Meidän poikamme ilmassa – me maassa ("Our Boys in the Air – and We on Land", 1934), both of them also directed by Karu. The film comes with a orchestral accompaniment arranged by Raine Ampuja in 2005, based on the original score by Lauri Näre and Emil Kauppi, which in turn was based on traditional Finnish military tunes.

A man reads a newspaper whose moving letters form 'Bill Bailey has come home'.

Sixty-year old Jindřich is waiting for a heart transplant. His wife, in an effort to protect him from a heart attack, has moved with him and their teenage daughter to their cottage in the countryside, so that he would have an absolutely peaceful life. But their son David comes for a holiday and he is not alone. He would like to discuss his life situation with his father but his mother intervenes as she is afraid that it would upset his father. Is, however, the worry about his health the real reason why she is making her children lie to their father?

袋 Fukuro (Japanese for "bag" or "sack") is a 3-minute short film from 2001. It features Pyramid Head and a Lying Figure from Silent Hill 2, the Fukuro Lady, and many monsters from early sketches for Silent Hill 2. The film contains disturbing, surreal imagery.

Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen gets his own story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy meets boy!

More than a dozen shots, some less than a second, of people wearing roller skates in various settings: a young man in skates sits on a low guardrail next to a city sidewalk reading, a woman with a child shoots by, a constable skates gingerly, a man skates by in suit and vest, another cleans front steps, children skate into a room where papa and siblings sit, someone slips at the base of stairs, a man in a cowboy hat moves fast, two jovial chubby women shake hands, our man in the hat trips over a wheelbarrow, then falls again as he rounds a corner, then down goes the constable. It's a crazy day on the city sidewalks.