In its 14th year, the onedotzero_adventures in motion festival continued to champion the unsung, the strange, and the familiar with a vast range of shorts from all over the globe. The diverse film program ranged from the sentimental to the ephemeral, with subject matter such as: motherhood, the Japanese character, love on the subway, and murky activities at a rave involving decapitated fruit—bringing further proof, if needed, that the moving image is alive, well, and animated in all its manifest forms. Along with some splendid short films, there were panel talks with creatives and designers. In the Creators’ Talk: Two x Two—chaired by influential graphic designer and writer Adrian Shaughnessy—Neville Brody spoke about his early career, back when everything was created by hand, from typography to record covers, and introduced Richard Harvey, a young man melding analogue and digital, virtual and real in his playful interactive installations, such as a floating weather forecaster and responsive bamboo drinking fountains.On Sunday there was a discussion about video games becoming the new indie filmmaking with Ben Hibon, director of Codehunters; Joey Ansah (who played the assassin in The Bourne Ultimatum), creator of Street Fighter: Legacy; and Allen Leitch from SPOV, the company who created the cut scenes in fanboy favorite Call of Duty: Black Ops, merging archive documentary footage with live action, 3D rendering, and animatics. All three are at the forefront of this brave new world of gaming, bringing their skills in motion graphics, art direction, CGI, and visual effects to bear on the gaming world. Their careful and considered work rivals that of any Hollywood movie, and during this panel they discussed how film and games are cross-pollinating and leaning on each other, with directors and animation studios working across both mediums, producing results good, bad, and meh.Another interesting talk was Friday’s Code Warriors Q&A, which looked at the relatively new practice of creating moving image from generative, code-based processes using Flash, Trapcode, VVVV, openFrameworks, Processing, and other software. The result is often stunningly beautiful visuals reacting to data, with the aesthetics changed by parameters set in code. As a new discipline, it really is in its infancy, and going through an experimental, sandbox phase. It’ll be an interesting area to watch as practitioners continue to play with the possibilities, and it has far-reaching potential in therapy—helping people with Asperger’s communicate and engage—along with applications for gaming, 3D modeling, and reactive installations. What could be quite exciting coming out of this is generative, free-form, 3D motion indie video games, using hacked technology from devices like Microsoft’s newly released Kinect, which could offer narrative-free, real-time virtual explorations.Throughout the festival there were several impressive installations, featured above in order of appearance: Feedback, an interactive installation mirror by Hellicar & Lewis and Todd Vanderlin; Cassette Playa’s gif-making video booth; Ovei personal cinema pods; Topologies by Quayola, which transform the paintings Las Meninas by Velazquez and Immacolata Concezione by Tiepolo into pulsating, refracted forms; and Eyjafjallajokull by Joanie Lemercier, an audiovisual mapping project inspired by the Icelandic volcanic eruption.Photo credit: Alexis Hamilton
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