AFI DigiFest: New Media Struts Its Stuff

“Why does the AFI get involved with digital?,” asked Nick De Martino, Senior Vice President, Media and Technology of the American Film Institute. afi-logo1 “It’s about the storytelling. From the very beginning with the nickelodeon, the technology has enabled these stories to be delivered. What’s interesting to me is, does the platform influence the story or is the story eternal? What happens as the platform changes? Do people have to create technology platforms in order for the story to be fully told? We hope to inspire you in the audience to have really great answers.”

Executive director Suzanne Stefanac also welcomed the crowd, noting that the Digital Content Lab was DeMartino’s vision 11 years ago. “One of the subtexts that’s grown up over the past year is…no excuses,” she said. “It used to be the skill sets were so daunting to create some kind of media that it was out of our realm.” That, clearly, is no longer true, as the day’s events amply demonstrated.

AFI DigiFest was, for the first time, was held at the Mann’s Grauman Chinese Theater, and more readily open to the public than past events. It worked. The theater was over-flowing with Hollywood types interested in what new media had to offer, and the two-day event didn’t disappoint.

Day One focused on the projects in-house at AFI’s Digital Content Lab. That included a session on mobile storytelling with L.M. Kit Carson and his firstthingslast Africa Diary, soon to be aired on the Sundance Channel, and also covered in MobilizedTV here. Perhaps one of the coolest mobile applications shown came from ScrollMotion. Their iPhone app First Things Last is described as “is the first interactive serial created exclusively for the iPhone… With a simple swipe forward or back, the story unfolds at the user’s pace, blending the literary and cinematic in an entirely new experience.” A picture is worth a thousand words; I recommend you watch the video below to see how it works.

Other cool demonstrations included one from LIVE MUSIC, in Mass Animation orchestrated the talents of 3D artists all over the world creating a single animation. Mass Animation is the brainchild of former Sony Pictures executive Yair Landau. The Purchase Brothers showed their guerrilla-style spec video, Escape from City 17, based on the Half Life videogame (and, indeed, included CG elements “borrowed” from the game). Made for less than $500, the video caught the attention of the gamers, as well as that of Hollywood (they were scooped up by Anonymous Content). Although brothers David and Ian didn’t announce their next production, one can only guess it’ll be made for a budget higher than $500.

Laurent Touil Tartour showed a fascinating series called Urban Wolf. The French director had the idea of using footage from surveillance cameras to tell a story of paranoia and suspense, featuring an American protagonist. With almost no dialogue, the first episode was an almost instant global urbanwolf hit. The series is made up of 15 four-minute episodes. Tartour described how the impetus for making Urban Wolf came out of his own disastrous experience making a feature film in France. After 5 days of shooting, he was forced to resign as director and the film ultimately bombed at the box office. “The powerful people promised I would never make a movie again, hence paranoia,” he said. “No one in France will even talk to me.” He may not need France anymore. Tartour revealed that he is now in discussions for a distribution plan for Urban Wolf. Although he wouldn’t be specific about these negotiations, he did say they would involve mobile rights to what is an ideal mobile entertainment property.

Trigger, the hybrid marketing agency that’s involved in creating marketing and branding media (including mobile) for motion pictures, showed off its augmented reality work on behalf of District 9. At ComiCon, says Trigger president Jason Yim, they handed out postcards with a code. “You hold it up to your webcam, and the computer would generate the 3D graphic,” he explained. “The neat thing is that the borders of it define the perspective, so if you tilt the card, the model will tilt.” Yim noted that this is “early-on augmented reality.” “You’ll be seeing more augmented reality in the fututre that’s more sophisticated, ” he promised. “The iPhone will really change things for augmented reality. When you can carry it in your pocket, you can point the phone at a bus banner or a TV commercial that the iPhone recognizes. That’s exciting. The other part that will change is that with GPS, we’ll be able to activate things based on where you are.”

Stefanac summed up the events by noting that many creators of media forms get it wrong: Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to talk one-to-one over his newly invented phone (which he thought would be used for public broadcasts) and Thomas Alva Edison famously said, regarding the prospect of motion pictures, “Who would want to sit in a dark room with a group of strangers and see moving pictures?” “Conclusions,” concluded Stefanac. “Are what we get when we got tired of thinking.” AFI Digital Content Lab is clearly one of the places where the thinking is ongoing.