Insider

Kevin Kelly: State of Cinema address

[Editor’s note: What follows is the State of Cinema address Kevin Kelly offered an audience Sunday, May 4, 2008, at the San Francisco International Film Festival.]

Welcome, welcome, welcome! This lovely theater here got dark and I thought, "Oh, great! It’s a movie! I can just sit back." I completely forgot that I have to give a talk. I would just love to sit here. Thank you to the San Francisco Film Festival for inviting me to speak on speculations on the future of where motion pictures are going. My role, I think, is to describe what I see as a little bit of an outsider. My method for doing this is very simple: to come [at it] as an outsider. We’re sitting here in a fantastic movie theater, but in fact more people see movies in airplanes than watch them in theaters. Airplanes and portable DVDs. But the movies aren’t made, usually, with that in mind. So what I’m trying to do is listen to the technology. Carver Mead, a technologist said, "Listen to the technology; see what it wants to say." And for the next 45 minutes, what I’m going to try to talk about is what I think the technology is telling us. The technology around moving pictures, motion pictures.

topics: authors, bay area, science fiction, technology

Report

SF Int'l announces its 51st program and year-round screen

The San Francisco International Film Festival announced not only its 2008 program today at the Westin St. Francis Hotel, but also the June 13 launch of its year-round programming on one screen at the Sundance Kabuki.

San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Graham Leggat told the assembled that the Film Society has been working very hard since he arrived to turn its programming into a “year-round operation,” and that the SFFS screen will feature international independent and documentary features with limited U.S. distribution.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is published by SFFS.]

Most of the event was devoted to unveiling the work inside the 51st Festival, which runs from April 24 through May 8. It opens with Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress, starring Asia Argento—one of three films in the Festival’s opening weekend featuring the actress, who Leggat spoke of as “alluringly vulpine. And that’s a compliment.” The International’s closing night is an Alex Gibney documentary with roots in San Francisco publishing, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Jonathan Levine’s Sundance hit The Wackness is the Centerpiece presentation.

topics: documentary, environmental films, exhibitions, french cinema, genre films, independent film, international film, italian cinema, midnight movies, san francisco film society, san francisco international film festival, sundance film festival, sundance kabuki, technology

Make: magazine

Those who are particularly good with their hands — or just like to read about people who are — might want to check out Make: magazine’s August 2007 issue. "Mister Jalopy’s Urban Guerrilla Movie House" will teach you how to hack a 15" LCD monitor into a vibrantly crisp-imaged movie projector that you can take on the road. (Mister Jalopy is shown beaming from the seat of the adult tricycle, complete with boombox, that he mounted it on.) This article contains tons of fascinating advice on how to do everything from turn two lengths of sewer pipe into a lens focuser to the proper way to mount a heat shield. This article is also for people who are not afraid of the words "Caution! Careful! Peligro! The bulb is very hot and bright. The bulb glass is a UV filter, so if it cracks, it will still power up, but you are being exposed to dangerous UV light."

How does it work? Basically, Mister Jalopy is careful, precise and extremely patient, and advises you to be the same. You pry up the back panel of an LCD display panel, remove the LCD screen ("Be amazed at the fragility of the LCD glass!") and set it aside — oh so gently — so that you can dummy up the measurements needed to mount the screen to a wooden base. Then you take a light reflector, a light source, a heat shield, two Fresnel lenses, and a projection lens and mount them at staggered intervals around the LCD screen — sandwich-style, like if a BLT came with the bacon, lettuce, and tomato set at different widths between the bread slices. Your finished product is placed within a fan-cooled, custom-built box.

Make this: Mister Jalopy shows you the way.

Can you use recycled items like a car headlight, a halogen worklight, or your granddaddy’s rear-projection TV? Probably not, says Mister Jalopy. To make life easier (and access to your completed projector faster), you can buy a kit that contains all of the essential projector parts from a company called Lumenlab. Lumenlab also hosts numerous online forums that include in-depth logs of completed projectors.

topics: technology

MobMov and the new-school drive-in movie

MobMov (short for "mobile movie") combines the four-wheeled charm of an old-time drive-in with the technologist’s urge to pimp his or her ride into a rolling film-projection booth. Located wherever there’s room to park, screenings are advertised by e-mail only a few days in advance, which adds to the underground appeal. (This September’s San Rafael screening was Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 eco-thriller "The Host," which is a particularly interesting cultural experience when seen on the side of an old Breuners furniture showroom, behind the local A&W.)

At a MobMov screening, you can see anything from vintage intermission shorts (downloadable from the Internet) to an independent film to a fully licensed Hollywood blockbuster. Plus, you can interact with others as you please. Want to bring your 6-month-old infant? Keep the windows rolled up, and no one will know the difference. Or you can eat snacks with your fellow patrons — viewers have brought pizza, tamales, cupcakes and even an entire cheesecake to share, says MobMov founder Bryan Kennedy.

According to San Rafael chapter driver Bill Stanton, MobMov screenings have a much more personal appeal than even the drive-ins that still exist. Last year while driving through Sacramento, Stanton stopped at the local drive-in on a whim — his girlfriend and her daughter saw the screen from the freeway — to see "Barnyard: The Original Party Animals." The experience was nothing special, he says, just the same kind of feeling that you get at any multiscreen movie theater. And the movie? "It was horrendous."

Kennedy, who works as a Web developer during the day, says that the only out-of-the-ordinary thing that’s ever happened was when a police officer came by after one of the shows. "I almost had a heart attack thinking he was going to fine me," he says, "but in fact he just told me that he’d seen us around a couple times and wondered what the radio station was so he could tune in."

Note: The San Francisco chapter just showed two screenings: Robert Zemeckis’ "Back to the Future" on Treasure Island last Friday, and the independent horror film "Head Trauma" (Lance Weiler, 2006) in the lot behind Burning Man headquarters last Saturday. To learn how to become a MobMov driver, or to sign up for your local chapter, go to the web site, http://www.mobmov.org. (No matter if you’re located in Long Beach or Lisbon; MobMov has chapters all over the world.)

topics: bay area, technology

Shooting People's Ingrid Kopp

topics: q&a, technology

Getting into your summer shorts with two online short film festivals

During these dog days of summer, air-conditioned movie theaters function as an oasis for those eager to escape the sweltering heat. Viewers of short films, however, aren’t restricted to the multiplex when they want to enjoy a cool cinematic treat. They can chill out anywhere, thanks to SXSWclick and IFC.com/Rooftop Films. These two online summer shortfests offer up a combined total of 115 shorts accessible via cell phone or laptop. So if you’re looking to avoid the summertime blues, skip the overcrowded cinema and watch shorts on your iPhone at the venue of your choosing. Pinkberry, anyone?

At http://sxswclick.com/watch, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference & Festival provides free downloads of fifteen shorts as part of the 2007 SXSWclick Festival. "The online video culture has changed dramatically in the four years we’ve been doing SXSWclick," reports festival producer Matt Dentler. "Next year, I imagine we’ll begin exploring even newer ways to get short content to audiences, either through changing technology or media."

[SF360.org editor’s note: This story appeared originally in indieWIRE on Aug. 15, 2007.]

Three shorts are capturing the lion’s share of this year’s SXSWclick’s traffic now that the voting public and the jury (Kal Penn, Bob Odenkirk, Doug Pray, and others) have selected the festival winners.
Will Elliott’s "Peterson’s Savings and Loan" won the viewer’s choice award (with 1,000 online votes cast) and the jury prize in the ‘Old School Shorts’ category. The nine-minute comedy features a highly relatable situation in which a hapless everyman spends countless hours on the phone providing increasingly personal information to pass his bank’s security verification procedure.

SxSWclick’s other bi-award winner, Danger Brown’s seven-minute "Pierre," snagged both the grand jury laurel and the ‘Animate-It’ category prize. The very accomplished film stars a mouse with excessive savoir-faire who is positive he will be irresistible to his new hot female roommate. Taking two years to complete, the 35 MM "Pierre" previously world-premiered at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, where it won the audience award.

The ‘Really Real Shorts’ category prizewinner, David Serota’s "Ubuntu," is a heartfelt three-minute documentary about an amazing arts program called Soweto Kliptown Youth Organization (SKY) located in an impoverished area of Johannesburg, South Africa. Let’s just say this film is right up Oprah’s alley.

"SXSWclick reflects the indie-minded and envelope-pushing philosophies that make SXSW in Austin such a great festival each year," sums up programmer Matt Dentler.

Whereas SXSW’s offline headquarters is Austin, Texas, Rooftop Films calls New York City its home. Claiming to offer "the most beautiful, breathtaking, honest, sublime and personal film and video work being made in short form," Rooftop’s physical-world summer series consists of 38 events, with upcoming screenings scheduled to take place on the roof of Museo del Barrio in East Harlem on Friday, August 17, and a Saturday August 18 screening of home movie-themed shorts on the lawn along the canal at The Yard at 400 Carroll Street.

Thanks to a partnership with the Independent Film Channel (IFC), Rooftop is also putting the summer screening series online, streaming for free on IFC.com. The online showcase began on June 8, and it will continue posting one new short every day throughout the summer until all 100 shorts are online. After September 22, the 100 films will continue to be archived on the website through the end of the year at http://www.ifc.com/films?aId=20130.

A sampling of the Rooftop Films debuting online this week gives a fairly accurate taste of the fare offered by this ambitious series. On August 11, Susan Youssef’s "Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf" was the official film-of-the-day. A ten-minute drama made in 2005, this story of a lustful teenage Arab-American with an intolerable home situation is chockfull of strong visual imagery.

On August 12: a black-and-white, static camera piece, Joe Nanashe’s "Shoot." In this two-and-a-half-minute 2004 short, the filmmaker plays target practice with the camera. Less than halfway through the film, after missing four times, he hits a bull’s eye. When he discovers the camera’s still running, he mutters, "Hell, let’s see if I can do it again."

On August 13: "Game Modding for the ’80s," another black-and-white, static-camera short. Directed by Jon Sasaki of Toronto, this eight-minute long piece plays it straight, as if it really were a Community Access Television show circa 1979 (as the end title graphic claims). The very intense young host demonstrates in great detail how he is modifying a pinball machine to make it more personalized. An ideal film for the G4/E3 crowd.

What does Rooftop Films have in store for the rest of August? Visit the website anytime anywhere to find out.

Enjoy your summer. And don’t forget to wear sunscreen if you’re watching shorts poolside.

[Kim Adelman is the author of "The Ultimate Filmmaker’s Guide to Short Films"]

topics: film festivals, shorts, technology