Last Friday took place another well-known film festival… probably one of the most important short film festivals ast this side of the pond: the X edition of Notodo’s filmfest.
And like every year there were winners from all backgrounds, sensitivities and formats… animated shorts, documentary shorts, triple destilation shorts, ordinary shorts, south-American shorts, freaky shorts, sponsored shorts…
The ceremony was streamed on-line, and like every year, as a present we have the possibility to enjoy every single film… not only the selected winners (list this way), but every single of the 168 finalists competing for one of the 15 prizes. Congratulations Ana, congratulations everyone.
Ridley Scott is from the “all about everything school”, and his sci-fi movies tend to be above everything else done before or after… pretty much. So the growing expectation about an Alien prequel (still in discussion if this is) has invaded every single corner of the Internet over the past few months.
After the leak last month the production team moved fast… and even if there’s still more than half a year until it’s premiere (the movie is still in post-production), the tension has grown around the facebook page and dedicated itunes minisite with short 30sec teasers with Mr Scott talking proudly about his new creature… and himself of course.
I guess he can be cocky after all, we’ll judge next summer after seeing his “few” plot surprises with explorers, egos, origins of mankind discoveries and… maybe monsters? Who knows!
It obviously had to arrive to our local cinema sooner or later. With the explosion of the Indie Game industry and pretty much every gaming platform network (Live, PSNetwork…) killing for the next best “Indie Game” to add to their catalog, it surprises me no-one has made a film out of the IG movement before (well… there’s been a few attempts before to be honest).
Well BlinkWorks(James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot) decided last year to dive, review and film some of the hottest titles that have transformed the gaming industry and brought it back to the 80s style. For the past year, they’ve been traveling North America filming indie game developers and editing their stories for Indie Game: The Movie, the feature film and the website….
A documentary about video games, their creators, the conception process, their stress (aren’t they supposed to enjoy themselves everyday?) .
The film tells the emotional story of a two-man team, Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, as they craft and release their first major game for XBOX, “Super Meat Boy”. It follows Phil Fish, the creator of the highly- anticipated game, “Fez”, as he shows it for the first time in 4 years at the giant gaming expo, PAX EAST. And, the film tells behind-the-scenes story an independent designer, Jonathan Blow, who made one of highest-rated video games of all-time, “Braid”.
The won’t only be telling us a future classic, but James & Lisanne have worked with some great talents within the industry itself picking some great artists like Jim Guthrie who’s composed the soundtrack for the film (remember S&S EP?…)
Four developers, three games, and one ultimate goal – to express one’s self through a video game.
The list of filmed game creators is quite complete……. even scary, so expect appearances from the creators behind Super Meat Boy, The Witness, World of Goo…. and many more. And even if they’ve done filming they still need to… polish it you know, so that’s why they’ve created this KickStarter page; so we highly encourage you to give them a hand… and await for the late-summer / early fall release.
Trying to cover every country’s short film festivals is very unlikely to happen for us… any day soon, but if at least we hear about them, then we can share them. Last week Tropfest 2011 (who claim to be world largest short film festival) took place in Australia…
