It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format using their talent craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today.

I think it's fun to play with worlds that you can add a lot of your own imagination to. With 'True Blood ' you're not limited by anything there are just leaps and bounds of the imagination you can take with these characters.

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this and who else other people may be and all that it's so grimly brutal!

Our imaginations are strong as children. Sometimes they get shoved aside these imaginations. They get dusty and mildewed with age. The imagination is a muscle that has to be put to use or it shrivels.

I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously.

'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination writing these stories of murder.

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

And you know whether it's drama or comedy the best work is based on truth. It's just that with comedy the circumstances are just crazy-heightened and you have these crazy things thrown at you. But you still have to do it truthfully because that's where the humor comes from. So it's not that difficult to cross over.

Every time I've done comedy in like traditional comedy clubs there's always these comedians that do really well with audiences but that the other comedians hate because they're just you know doing kind of cheap stuff like dancing around or doing like very kind of base sex humor a lot and stuff like that.

I certainly didn't say while writing 'Gossip Girl ' 'Oh this is going to be big!' It was really like 'Oh god everyone's gong to hate these people! They're so bratty!' But I actually think what is so appealing about them is the humor in them.