UT Filmmaker Awarded Inaugural Vimeo Short Film Grant
UT Filmmaker John C Kelley has been awarded the inaugural Vimeo Short Film Grant for his animated project, The Ineffable Hum.
Kelley, an associate professor of Cinema Studies and Time-Based Art at the University of Tennessee, is one of five filmmakers selected from thousands to receive the first-of-its-kind award. The grant includes $30,000 in funding, access to state-of-the-art equipment, distribution support, and one-on-one mentorship from acclaimed filmmakers on the selection jury and Vimeo’s Curation Team.
“I can’t wait to talk to them,” Kelley said. The selection jury includes David Lowery, Charlotte Wells, Sean Wang, Adam Bricker, and Savannah Leaf—all filmmakers Kelley has admired as an artist and an educator.
“I’m super curious about their career trajectories,” he continued. “Savannah Leaf still shows video art in museums, as well as making films. I’m really interested in that, being able to straddle the line between cinema and art, because it’s what our program at UT is trying to do.”
Vimeo’s new grant program aims to support films based on artistic merit, uniqueness, and potential impact and resonance, highlighting the power of “human storytelling” in an era when algorithms increasingly shape our relationship with film, said Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer.
“It’s encouraging that complicated, complex stories have a place and supporters in the industry,” Kelley said. “It seems like a bright spot in a dark time for the film industry, when so much is driven by the bottom line and return on investment, and there’s less emphasis on creative practice or making good art.”
The Ineffable Hum follows a character across five vignettes spanning a lifetime, each story unfolding in and around cars. The project has roots in Kelley’s earlier animated films, several of which were Vimeo Staff Picks.
“I want to do what I already do better, and this support from Vimeo will help me do that,” Kelley said. “It’ll still be a gritty film, but it will also have the ability to reach a larger audience.”
Capturing the ineffable is what the best films do, and John C Kelley excels at this through his sparse palette, immersive sound design, and unique lyricism in both image and word. The emotional weight of his own reckoning with the present and past is expressed through animation with a distinctly human touch—at times brutally plain, at others delightfully abstract. This new project marks a progression in technique and form, and we can’t wait to see it come to life.
— Vimeo Short Film Grant Jury Statement on The Ineffable Hum
While teaching animation courses at the School of Art this fall, Kelley will work to complete production on The Ineffable Hum by the end of the calendar year. Vimeo will begin screening the completed film projects in Los Angeles and New York City in late 2025.
Kelley hopes the experience will help show his students what it’s like to produce a high-visibility project under a tight deadline.
“We’ll all be in there in the trenches,” he said. “It should work out well, having some concrete, real-world applications for the stuff we’re learning.”
Kelley is the second Time-Based Art and Cinema Studies professor at UT to have been awarded a major film grant this year. In January, Assistant Professor Janelle VanderKelen received a $50,000 Creative Capital Award to support her project The Golden Thread—an experimental documentary about Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century abbess, proto-feminist scholar, composer, and self-taught naturalist.
“It’s exciting that Time-Based Art faculty are making important work that’s being supported,” said Kelley. “We’re learning more that we can show our students, and we’re involving students in those processes. It’s win-win.”
Learn more about Kelley’s work and the Vimeo Short Film Grant at https://vimeo.com/shortfilmgrant.