Film Futurist

I just got back from LA (which is where I both attended film school and spent the majority of my professional life until about a year ago) and something struck me this time that had never occurred to me before: there is no model for innovation in Hollywood. Most of the younger folks in the [...]

Over the last few months, the YouTube-Guggenheim collaboration known as YouTube Play has been a recurring subject on this blog. Now the finalists have been announced and they will be shown in various Guggenheim locations around the world this weekend (Oct 22-24). After watching the final selections, I decided to post two of the most [...]

Early in the summer I wrote about the YouTube Play, the Guggenheim + YouTube collaboration in search of the next big thing in video. A recent visit to the site revealed the Guggenheim curators’ shortlist of about 200 videos which will be voted on by a jury in a few weeks. While I have not [...]

It was just a matter of time before the art gods found Youtube. In a time when the gap between the big cultural institutional powers-that-be and the masses has grown larger than ever, a reach into the wilds of the aggregated video world was inevitable. It is, for instance no surprise that the advent of [...]

DIY filmmakers have always inherently understood the idea of microfunding, because in some sense or another, raising a few hundred or thousand from friends and family IS essentially the same idea. And now, with social media providing the kind of community reach that would have been impossible even ten years ago, this model has become [...]

After all the hoopla about the 3D in James Cameron’s Avatar, and then this week at CES with all the talk about 3D Television, I thought we might take a little walk down the modern art aisle whilst browsing for entertainment. Not as schmaltzy as Avatar, and definitely heavier than most TV programming, Picasso’s Guernica. [...]

I recently saw Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis – a masterwork of the German Expressionist period summarized here by Kino Video after its recent full-length re-release: ”Metropolis takes place in 2026, when the populace is divided between workers who must live in the dark underground and the rich who enjoy a futuristic city of splendor. The tense balance of [...]

This is a PS3 game. Not a piece of installation art. That’s all I’ll say for now. Ponder that while I go buy a Sony Playstation. Seriously though, I’m curious – really curious. So consider this Part 1. In Part 2, I’ll discuss what this could mean in the wider space of media art and [...]

This is an amateur movie made by a member of the The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in 1947. Strange, you may think, as it seemed to me when I first watched this one of several films created by members of this Society as a way to analyze their dreams. Initially, The Lion Dream struck me [...]

At the FOE4 Conference, I was struck by something Mike Monello said on when speaking on a panel. He said something I had never thought of quite that way before: that as a Transmedia creator, one’s role becomes that of a creator/performer – not in the sense that the storyteller is acting per se, but [...]