Wholphin was born in 2005, and was named for a new species of animal, a cross between a bottlenose dolphin and a false killer whale. Founding editor Brent Hoff quips that it's 'a terrible name, nobody can remember it, pronounce it or even knows what it is. That kind of breaks every rule of branding.'
He originally planned the magazine would publish for two years, then go completely online. But he was surprised by a quickly growing subscriber base and people's 'desire to own the films'. And over the eight editions since then, he became aware of an enormous pool of film and video that didn't exist online and was for various reasons being kept in bedroom drawers or rental storage. Often, these works, which the magazine bills in its tagline as 'rare and unseen', were deemed by their creators to be too serious, delicate or perhaps personally important to abandon to the whims of online audiences. An example is the Al Gore Documentary, an intimate portrait shot in a single day by American music video director Spike Jonze. Wholphin released the film in the wake of Gore's failed presidential bid in 2000, and Hoff, in the extensive written notes that accompany every issue, lamented: 'This film might have wiped away, in 22 minutes, Gore's reputation as a robot.'
Other major names have contributed films that would have otherwise never seen the light of day. Miranda July's four-minute short Are You the Favourite Person of Anybody, a charming and open-ended vignette centred around a man taking a survey, was shot while she was in the middle of filming her debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know. American documentary film director Errol Morris contributed a five-minute segment of Donald Trump providing a critical analysis of Citizen Kane - it's just as wonderfully ironic as it sounds.
Wholphin is a seamless mix of documentary, animation, dramatic shorts, science films and even redubbed international sitcoms.
'The only thing I'm trying to do is not waste your time,' Hoff says. But there is no denying his sense for literary depth. Beyond a certain prerequisite of entertainment value, the films are also artfully composed and, more often than not, endowed with an ethical purpose.