| |
|
|
|
|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
The Week in Germany: Current Affairs September 22, 2006Hamburg’s Bitfilm Digital Film Festival Brings Tiny Digital Movies to the Big Screen and Big Screen Blockbusters to the Internet Media-savvy Hamburg, home to many of Germany’s most prominent publishing houses, television companies, and advertising agencies, is busy tilling the soil at the digital frontier with the seventh annual Bitfilm festival this fall. The festival celebrates the aesthetic fruit of the most obscure digital subcultures alongside Hollywood’s latest blockbusters while providing a forum for exploring new commercial opportunities for both.
Founded with the support of the city of Hamburg and the EU Media Programme in 2000 as both an online forum for digital filmmakers and an annual festival, Bitfilm is as much an online phenomenon as it is an event in the City of Hamburg. Since September 7, all 130 of the participating films (culled from 750 submissions by the curators) can be viewed online. Despite the fact that the festival is now totally wired, festival Director Aaron König wanted to be sure that Bitfilm is not just a virtual event: “an event in the real world can never be replaced. Nothing compares to a good chat at the bar about the films and a wild party with the other film maniacs.” So, the Bitfilm festival will culminate from in a live event in Hamburg featuring screenings, audiovisual live shows, parties, talks, and workshops from November 2-4. New Media in the Spotlight The filmmakers featured here run the gamut from Hollywood impresarios like Peter Jackson, whose King Kong is in the running for the “Grand Prix” feature film category, to underground programmers who make short videos as a kind of digital graffiti. Bitfilm was the first festival worldwide to introduce a category for “demos,” which are short animations that often precede “cracked” video games to show off the gamecracker’s programming skills. While the demos originated on the dinosaur of home computers – the Commodore 64 – a sophisticated international community with its very own aesthetic continues to push the envelop with more and more elaborate demos. Another new medium highlighted by the Bitfilm festival is “Machinima” – films shot live in purely virtual environments. Essentially scripted video games, machinima offers filmmakers the chance to design their own characters and backgrounds and control their actions in real time. Viral Marketing, or Art in Your Inbox? As Bitfilm trains its spotlight on underground filmmakers otherwise bathed in the pale glow of their laptops screens, it is asking the question most relevant to all novel technologies: is there money to be made here? The answer, according to the festival’s organizers, is yes. The phenomenon of “virus movies”, short online films that snowball through links on the internet and forwarded e-mails to reach millions, has not gone unnoticed by the marketing and advertising industries. Marketing experts will speak at the festival on how advertisers can harness the power of these online epidemics to sell products, and the online festival represents a giant experiment in viral marketing itself. The traditional film festival jury has been crowdsourced. On November 1, Bitfilm will present awards to the films with the highest “viral potential” – those that have been forwarded by the most users to their friends.
The city of Hamburg hopes that viral marketing will also help spread
the word that it is a top location for digital media. Visitors to the
Bitfilm festival website can use “Pauliwood” an interactive
online film tool named after the port city’s infamous Red Light
District St. Pauli to make their own virus films. Users upload their own
photographs to give a face to a cast of St. Pauli denizens and provide
a title for the film. The resulting film can then be forwarded to (hopefully)
amuse friends and colleagues, who just might also be reminded that Hamburg
is the media capital of Germany.
Links:
|
|
More from Germany.info  Newsletters
 Printer-Friendly
Page
Email This Article |
||
|
|||||
|
|||||
