About – PREVO

Exceptional short films vanish after the festival circuit. The filmmaker moves on. The audience never sees the work. PREVO exists to break that cycle.

The filmmaker's problem

Thousands of extraordinary short films are finished every year. They screen at two or three festivals, collect a laurel, and disappear onto a hard drive. There is no market for them and no route from a festival win to a career – only the hope that someone useful happened to be sitting in the room.

The audience's problem

Meanwhile the most interesting new filmmaking anywhere is the hardest thing to actually watch. It isn't on the major services, and an endless feed of unscreened uploads is not the same as being handed something good by a person who watched it first.

These are two halves of the same problem, and nothing sat in between them. So we built the venue. PREVO is a curated streaming platform – now 130+ films strong – where emerging filmmakers premiere their work to a paying audience, and where that audience decides which films reach a panel of working industry professionals. Our weekly magazine, The Weekend Read, covers the films and the people making them with real criticism and industry analysis. Our live events – awards ceremonies, interviews, filmmaker conversations – are what turn an audience into a community.

Everything here runs on one idea: a vote is worth more than a view. Watching a film is passive. Choosing between films means you watched carefully, you have an opinion, and you have a stake in the outcome. That is what makes a PREVO award mean something to a filmmaker, and it is why the people who vote are the people who pay.

Our mission

Give every serious short film a permanent home, a paying audience, and a real route to the people who can hire the filmmaker who made it.

The long game

To become the place the industry looks when it wants to know who's next – because every director you can name made a short film first, and almost none of them were found on purpose.

Tomorrow's filmmakers, premiering today.

How it works

A competition, not a content library.

Most platforms end at the play button. Here, watching is the beginning of the process – not the end of it.

01

Filmmakers submit

Free, year-round, from festivals and film schools worldwide. Every film is screened by a person before it premieres.

02

The films premiere

A real launch on the platform, with the filmmaker and cast credited, tagged and covered editorially.

03

Members watch and vote

Subscribers vote across five categories. The most-voted film in each becomes a Nominee. Your membership is your ballot.

04

The industry decides

Nominees go to a panel of agents, producers and executives, who pick the winners and explain why, live on stream.

Since July 2024

What we've built so far.

130+

curated short films,
every one screened first

3

industry-judged
competitions completed

60

weekly issues of
The Weekend Read

5

award categories,
decided by members

Who we are

A small team, and a lot of films.

Ryder McNeal

Ryder McNeal

Founder & CEO

While working toward a Film BA and Marketing BBA at Southern Methodist University, Ryder produced several short films across the country – and noticed that the independent distribution model was broken. Exceptional student and indie work would screen at a festival, maybe two, and then disappear. No audience. No second life. No path forward for the filmmaker.

He founded PREVO in 2024 to fix that. Two years later he oversees the platform full-time – editorial, filmmaker relations, competitions, and everything in between. He is also working toward his MBA at SMU.

Colt Waller

Colt Waller

Co-Founder & Chief of Programming

Colt Waller is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and producer with experience across production, development, IP packaging and talent management. He has worked at Miramax, contributing to a range of high-profile projects.

Production credits include

The Holdovers (2023), Old Dads (2023), The Beekeeper (2024), Here (2024)

At PREVO, Colt has leveraged his industry relationships to build the competition's judging panels and develop partnerships with working production companies – creating a real path from PREVO's platform to the broader industry.

The Weekend Read

Read the latest issue →

We take the films seriously enough to write about them.

Sixty weekly issues and counting. Film criticism, industry analysis, and interviews with working professionals – published every Sunday, free to read, and part of every membership.

Miles Stephenson

Chief Film Critic

Writes the anchor essays and conducts the Behind the Scenes interviews. Ties films to film history, philosophy and the wider culture – rigorous, and never dry.

Nicolas James

Contributor

Covers the weekend's releases and the business behind them. Pepperdine MFA.

Every director you can name made a short film first.

Come and find the next one before anybody else does. 130+ curated films, a new premiere every week, and a vote in every competition.

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