Calvin Reeder

Filmmaker Calvin Reeder splits his time between Seattle and Los Angeles, making seedy, hilarious splatter films for the Georgetown set. From his 2003 film Jerkbeast, he's gone on to make three short films, each besting the last in visual sophistication, comedic timing, and gross-out depravity. His last two films, the incest freak show Little Farm and the vomit porn The Rambler, both made it into Sundance—a feat accomplished by only one other Seattle-based filmmaking team. And as his profile increases, so do his production values. The Rambler wasn't just nasty fun. It was an old-fashioned, 16 mm beauty. ANNIE WAGNER

Sarah Jane Lapp

Illustrator, animator, and live-action filmmaker Sarah Jane Lapp is best known for two semifictional animated films about work: Chronicles of a Professional Eulogist, in which a rabbi discloses his trade secrets, and Chronicles of an Asthmatic Stripper, about the strange disjunction between perceiving one's own body as both an object of visual interest and a physiological machine. Lapp's signature quavery, hand-drawn and -painted cell animation looks absolutely handsome and feels personal—a perfect match for her idiosyncratic character portraiture. ANNIE WAGNER

Rob Cunningham and Tony Mullen

Way back in 2001, a funny little Super-8 film called The Devices of Gustav Braustache, Bachelor of Science won The Stranger's PEEP Short Film Festival. Then, seven years later, cowriters and directors Tony Mullen and Rob Cunningham screened its sequel, Gustav Braustache and the Auto-Debilitator, at STIFF. The film—on top of being comically pitch-perfect—oozes craftsmanship and care: from dainty stop-motion-animated salamanders to charmingly surreal machines to truly impressive quantities of mustache wax. LINDY WEST

Zia Mohajerjasbi

The eye of the Hollywood studio sees little more of Seattle than the Space Needle; the local filmmaker, however, sees a dynamic relationship between the urban and the natural, between concrete and trees, between outside and inside. In his latest video for Blue Scholars, "Loyalty," director Zia Mohajerjasbi contrasts the rural with hiphop's multicultural solidarity. A group of urban youth walk across a field of wild grass. Though we do not see a single building, we never feel that we are anywhere else but in the middle of Seattle. CHARLES MUDEDE

annie@thestranger.com