Natural Born Megahertz

Once again, any number of processors have been thrumming and beavering away tirelessly in close collaboration with specialised software tools to enable hardcore devotees of the digital film scene to offer temporary asylum from reality to everyone visiting this year’s International Short Film Festival Hamburg – never an easy offer to turn down.
The international output of computer-generated short films has required various contributing elements to be modelled, programmed, rendered, illuminated, dubbed, flashed, morphed and even – on rare occasions – financed. However, experience has shown that a generous production budget is by no means a guarantee of either quality or entertainment value. In the seven years since it was first introduced, the NoBudget section of this festival has consistently proven that computer animation produced on a shoestring can be as beguiling in its own subtle fashion as its more expensive contemporaries.

In addition to the competition categories and in co-operation with the Internet site of the same name, this year’s bitfilmFestival will be presenting a special programme addressing the phenomenon of the increasing interaction between the worlds of film and computer games.

While the Hollywood studios are falling over themselves to bring out feature films based on popular computer games such as Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy and Resident Evil in order to cash in on their commercial potential, the games-virus has spread through the short film scene as a result of the technical possibilities it offers. Software which was originally intended for use in programming a game – game engine, in short – has increasingly been made available by the manufacturer over the Internet to groups of fans enabling them to push ahead and develop their own variations on existing characters, environments and stories. While this initially led to
little more than products such as Doom and Quake becoming more widespread, a growing number of initiates soon began using the special technique to create their own short films.

Hugh Hancock, founder of Machinima.com and one of the gurus of this new-found digital film sect, will be appearing as a special guest at the bitfilm Festival and will be presenting the very best of the short films created using the game-engine software. Another first for this year’s festival will be the co-operation with the Festival International du Film d’Internet (FIFI) in France. The festival’s founder and president Vincy Thomas will be presenting the highlights of this year’s FIFI and the international Alliance of Digital Festivals – to which the bitfilmFestival (www.bitfilm.de) belongs.

BITFILM COMPETITION 1

BITFILM COMPETITION 2