Attending last year's edition of the Disposable Film Festival (DFF) proved to be a delightful eye-opening experience. Without a doubt, it was the deciding factor in my purchasing an iPhone. Once I knew what could be done with it, I was eager to start playing. If DFF got an old codger like me motivated, imagine how it inspires young media makers?! Playfulness is the spirit presiding over DFF, which provides its annual forum of the year's best "disposable" films, free workshops to advance the disposable genre, and festive parties to socialize with the cast and crew. In the spirit of collaboration and egalitarian access, DFF deserves being dubbed by Moviemaker magazine as "one of the coolest film festivals."
Recounting territory covered by my conversation with DFF festival co-founder and Director Carlton Evans, DFF was created in 2007 to celebrate the artistic potential of disposable video—short films made on non-professional devices such as cell phones, pocket cameras and handycams, webcams, and other readily available video capture devices. DFF hosts traditional theater and outdoor "Bike-In" screenings, competitions, filmmaking workshops and other events to showcase the best work within the disposable genre. DFF premieres each year in San Francisco before traveling to cities across the country and internationally.
The fifth edition of DFF will be held March 22-March 25, 2012. In addition to screenings of films made on everything from cell phones to web cams, this year's festival offers panel discussions and workshops with topics such as knowing your music/video licensing rights and social action and disposable filmmaking. There will also be a competitive shorts program, guest speakers, multimedia performances and plenty of after parties. A "Geek" event will showcase the latest and greatest gadgets, accessories, sites and apps for the disposable filmmaker. DFF Travels will screen the year's best travel video submissions.
"The number and quality of entries this year surpassed anything we've seen before," said festival co-founder and Director Carlton Evans. "People across the globe are finding themselves empowered through new inexpensive video technologies. And they're using them to tell their stories."
"We're absolutely bursting at the seams with new programs and screenings based on the collection of interesting trends we are seeing in the submissions and other amazing disposable film online," said Associate Director Katie Gillum.
The year's festival opens on the heels of a year filled with new partnerships and exciting events. Highlights included a "Best of the Fest" screening at Slamdance, a partnership with Practice Fusion and health-related film contest, a co-presentation of user-generated feature-length documentary Life In A Day [covered by Evening Class correspondent Dominic Mercurio], Bike-Ins and international screenings.
DFF 2012 kicks off with its Competitive Shorts Night at its sophomore premiere at the famous Castro Theater, March 22 at 8:00 PM. All films will be rated by an expert panel of judges [including, yours truly], and fans can vote for their favorites during the Audience Choice Award.
Among the workshops offered this year are those for youth hosted by TILT whose mission it is to teach young people—who are typically underrepresented and misrepresented in media—the fundamentals of movie-making and media literacy through hands on training in video production.
Guest speakers at DFF 2012 include iPhone animator Sascha Ciezata and Ted Hope who's produced such blockbuster films as Towelhead, Adventureland and The Savages.
The festival will wrap with two educational panels. Lights, Camera, Social Action! will focus on advocacy and Disposable Filmmaker 101 will show fans how to prep, shoot, edit and share a disposable film. Here's all the festival details:
Thursday, March 22: 8:00PM
Opening Night at The Castro
The Castro Theater: 429 Castro St.
TICKETS: Buy now: $14 RSVP: Facebook
Join DFF for the fifth annual opening night screening of the year's best disposable short films in the lavish Castro Theater. Yes, the organist will be there! Opening night has sold out every year, so grab your tickets before they sell out. They would love to save you a seat. Afterparty at The Lookout.
Following the premiere, DFF has a weekend full of events that are free to anyone who's curious and creative. But space is very limited, so RSVP to save your spot before the events fill up.
Friday, March 23: 5:00PM
Know Your Rights
Hotel Rex: 562 Sutter St. RSVP: Eventbrite
How do you legally use music and footage from other sources? At this panel on music/video licensing, discover what is available and how to decide how others use your work. Free!
Friday, March 23: 7:00PM
Insight from Ted Hope
Hotel Rex: 562 Sutter St. RSVP: Eventbrite
How do great films get made? Get insight from Ted Hope, America's leading independent producer, who will be speaking about what makes a project great both in terms of artistic innovation and financial viability. Free!
Saturday, March 24: 11:30AM
Mobile Filmmaking
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building)
Learn the ins and outs of producing media using mobile devices. This workshop is for ages 13 to 20. Free!
Saturday, March 24: 2:30PM
Young People Make Films
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building)
An engaging panel discussion with young media producers and media organizations. Free!
Saturday, March 24: 4:00PM
Meet Sascha Ciezata
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite
iPhone animator Sascha Ciezata became an instant internet success. He received acclaim from such greats as David Lynch until an obscure group removed his film from the internet. We'll be screening this banned classic and speaking with the filmmaker, as well as screening some of his other incredible work. Free!
Saturday, March 24: 8pm
DFF Rocks!
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite
A night of the best disposable music videos and tunes by DJ Matt Haze. Free! Brought to you by Vimeo Music Store. This event is open to partiers 21 and over only.
Sunday, March 25: 12:00 noon
Lights, Camera, Social Action!
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite
A panel on disposable film and change: activists, educators, and non-profits discuss how disposable film is spurring social change. Free!
Sunday, March 25: 2:00PM
Disposable Film 101
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite
Learn the tips and tricks of disposable storytelling, shooting, editing, and distribution from Vimeo Video School's Dan Hayek! Free!
Sunday, March 25: 5:00PM
DFF Geek
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite
Discover the latest and greatest gadgets, accessories, sites and apps for the disposable filmmaker at this one of a kind indie expo. Presented by BoomGrip, a steadycam for your mobile device with dozens of hacks and uses. Free!
Sunday, March 25: 7:00PM
DFF Travels
Typekit Headquarters: 2601 Mission Street at 22nd (Top of the US Bank building) RSVP: Eventbrite
Not your uncle's travel slide show! Come celebrate closing night with a selection of the year's best travel videos, presented by AirBnB. Wine courtesy of Avalon Winery. This event is open to partiers 21 and over only. Free!
"The only real important filmmakers at the moment are the thousand and thousand YouTube providers."—Heddy Honigmann, in a Facebook entry dated Wednesday, March 12, 2011.
The Disposable Film Festival (DFF) and YouTube co-presented a special free screening of Oscar®-winning film director Kevin Macdonald's Life In A Day at the Sundance Kabuki Theater, San Francisco on Wednesday, July 20, 2011. Life In A Day (produced by Ridley Scott) is a user-generated feature-length documentary, shot on a single day—July 24, 2010—that enlisted the global community to capture a moment of their lives on camera. Culled from over 80,000 videos to YouTube, the 90-minute feature pulls together deeply personal, powerful films from contributors from Australia to Zambia, from the heart of bustling major cities to the furthest and most remote reaches of the earth. Life In A Day director Kevin McDonald and editor Joe Walker were available for a Q&A following the screening.
DFF Executive Director Carlton Evans said, "It's an absolute pleasure and an honor to be a part of this event. The DFF hopes that more projects like this will bring everyday artists' work to the silver screen." Added festival Associate Director Katie Gillum, "Life In A Day is a testament to the capability and power of disposable filmmaking. The film could not have been produced without widespread access to disposable media like cell phones or digital cameras and without the freedom and flexibility they afford."
The Evening Class thanks Dominic Mercurio for offering his perspective on the event.
* * *
Are you alive? Then see this film. Many films explore the human experience, but Kevin Macdonald's Life In A Day dives into the deep end of humanity's essence. This ambitious project asked the YouTube community to upload videos of their day on July 24, 2010. The experiment resulted in over 4,500 hours of footage submitted from 140 countries around the world. The staggering amount of footage was funneled down into a 95-minute visual time capsule of one day in our lives as humans, documented by ourselves. The concept is old, the execution is undeniably innovative, and the result is astounding.
What makes the film stand out is its brilliant use of our society's penchant for over-sharing. Social media has reached a crescendo and YouTube has been the one stop shop to find just about anything you could ever want to see, captured on video. Life In A Day masterfully pieces together a candid look at ourselves. Tapping into the direct line that YouTube creates from a single person to the rest of the world, Macdonald has removed one of the stigmatas of documentary filmmaking—the film crew—thereby underscoring the frequent argument that documentaries cannot objectively see the truth as long as there are people behind the camera imposing their editorial perspective on a subject situation. By empowering everyday subjects with cameras, documentary's thin pretense of objectivity capsizes and a subjectified portrait of real people from around the world emerges.
The film itself is essentially a feature-length YouTube video, complete with visuals ranging from camera phone to professional cinematography, and ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes. Moments are sequentially experienced as the channel flips from one country to the next through editing whose pace resembles the average internet users online experience, cribbed as it is by internet attention deficit disorder. Some say the average attention span of an internet user is a mere three minutes, so congratulations on getting this far in this article.
Trying to describe the film to someone who has not yet seen it is a difficult task. Singling out individual clips that struck me as powerful and poignant probably won't comport with the clips that resonate with others, but the variety of clips dropping you in the middle of hundreds of countries and situations ensures that there is something in this film for everyone. The film's celebratory vibe throughout its duration keeps it consistently fascinating and entertaining. While there is no real narrative arc to speak of, I would say it still tells a story. It's the story that we each live every day, though this one particular day is thoroughly documented.
Commencing at midnight (relative of course to where in the world you are), Life In A Day observes morning routines of people around the globe, carries on through the day, and eventually returns to midnight. With that bare bones cyclic structure in place, Life In A Day finds plenty of wiggle room to explore common themes: touching on love, death, happiness, wonder, growing up, possessions, technology, fear, and hope.
What becomes clear early on in the film is just how similar life can be around the world. It's easy to believe that an individual life is unlike anyone else's, but watching Life in a Day focuses less on difference and capitalizes on similarity. This isn't to demean our individual lives, but to bracket them within an omnipresent sense that "we are all one." The film solicits an identification with other people from other parts of the world.
The unique emotional punch of Life In A Day depends on what the viewer considers unique. By graciously providing a thrilling look at the world at a level only achievable through the tools of information in 2010, Life In A Day gives what the viewer, in turn, is willing to give. Allowing one's mind to wander through one's own experiences to explore how they relate to what the film provides can be a rewarding experience of connectivity. If films are meant to be hyper-reality, it could be argued that Life In A Day is simply reality, unprecedented for being unadorned and honest. It's hard to shake the feeling of communitas that the film inspires. Undoubtedly, when the lights come up in the theater, you'll hope to catch the eyes of fellow audience members to determine whether or not they feel the same.
Cross-published on Twitch.
"The only real important filmmakers at the moment are the thousand and thousand YouTube providers."—Heddy Honigmann, in a Facebook entry dated Wednesday, March 12, 2011.
With my preview entry of the 2011 Disposable Film Festival (DFF), I've launched a series of entries that will explore what is "disposable" and "discontinuous" in Bay Area cine-events, exploring the proposition that these new forms of exhibition are changing the face of film culture not only locally but, arguably, globally. Continuing my coverage of DFF, I had an opportunity to catch up with DFF's Co-Founder and Festival Director Carlton Evans to tease out some of his thoughts.
Carlton Evans studied art history and film theory at Stanford University and earned his Ph.D exploring New York's cultural environment during the sixties. He then went on to do TV work at KQED and became involved in film production and, in fact, produced two films that were at Sundance this year, including Tiffany Shlain's Connected: A Declaration of Interdependence (2011). Along with helming DFF, since Sundance he has started producing a new feature film, collaborating as co-writer with Matthew Lessner (The Woods), who will direct.
* * *
Michael Guillén: Thank you for taking the time today, Carlton. I'm intrigued by your festival and I'm sorry I haven't been on board before now; but, it sounds like you're really amping it up this year with your premiere at the Castro Theatre.
Carlton Evans: Yeah, it's really exciting. It's our first year at the Castro, which is bigger than any of the places we've premiered before. We started out at ATA in January 2008 and have been opening at the Roxie the last couple of years.
Guillén: Has the shift to the Castro been necessitated because your audience has grown?
Evans: Yeah. The past two years we sold out double screenings at the Roxie so we felt we were ready for the Castro. So far things are great. It looks like we're going to be selling out the Castro as well for opening night.
Guillén: It's my understanding you co-founded this festival with Eric Slatkin?
Evans: That's right.
Guillén: The term "disposable film" is an interesting one for me. I Googled it and came up with little and it isn't even on Wikipedia yet, so there you go. Where did the term "disposable film" come from?
Evans: The term came up for Eric and me at our first meeting. He was showing me a camera that he had just discovered that was a $20 one-time-use digital video camera. Basically, you shoot 20 minutes of footage, take it back to the drug store and they process it onto a DVD for you. Essentially it's a disposable camera that shoots digital footage. It seemed to us that this was going to completely change the way people had access to video making. Sure enough, over the next year or so, digital video cameras started showing up in every cell phone, and they became more and more ubiquitous, to the point where a lot of cell phones now—like iPhone 4—shoot absolutely gorgeous footage and rival the DSLRs. So we wanted to create a forum where we could push the boundaries of this kind of work. We figured that—if people were making films on these kinds of things—that there should be some kind of venue that would celebrate and help raise the standard of the work being made. 2008 was our first public event and we're going into our fourth season.
Guillén: I'm intrigued by how you have reclaimed and recontextualized the term "disposable" and that—like recent discussions on "discontinuous film viewing"—you've taken the term and flipped it around to give it a positive connotation.
Evans: The way we think about it, there's some amount of irony in the term because, obviously, the work that's being made on these inexpensive devices is far from disposable; it's enduring film work. It's having a major impact on—not only online video platforms—but also the film industry. I'm not sure if you've heard of this film Life In A Day (2011)?
Guillén: I have not.
Evans: It's a film that YouTube made with Ridley Scott directed by Kevin MacDonald (Last King of Scotland). They solicited footage from the YouTube community. They asked people to shoot their lives for one day last Summer and then the footage was cut into a feature-length film. This was a film whose story would never have been told without the use of these inexpensive cameras, which are now literally everywhere.
Guillén: Fascinating. I'll have to check that out. Let's take a look at DFF's program lineup this year. Along with the Castro opening night premiere, you're doing a tribute to filmmaker Christopher P. McManus. Can you talk about his work and why you've included it in your festival this year?
Evans: Absolutely. Christopher McManus is an artist based in Philadelphia and he has been using these inexpensive cameras to make films and has created an amazing following for himself. He's shown his video works at the Tate London and all over the United States and basically has been able to do that simply because of the accessibility of the equipment he uses.
We first saw his work when he submitted a film last year in the shorts program and it was a big, popular film with our audiences so we decided this year to show the body of his work and have him come and be in conversation with Vimeo's Andrea Allen, who will be hosting the program.
Guillén: I'm likewise intrigued by this interactive media event you've arranged with Pomplamoose.
Evans: We're very excited about that too. Pomplamoose, as you probably know, is this band that made a name for themselves by editing their own music videos. They've had so much attention now; something like 52,000,000 views on YouTube. They've become complete YouTube superstars! They very rarely perform live. We're very lucky to have them join us. They're going to lead a music video workshop, then we'll show some of their work, and then they'll do a live performance, which people will be able to shoot and afterwards—using the techniques they've learned from the workshop—cut into a music video that they can then post online so we can find it later.
Guillén: That sounds like nothing but fun! I imagine tickets for that are going fast?
Evans: Yeah, we're expecting that to sell out.
Guillén: Can you speak to this trend that's being termed "discontinuous viewing" of the youthful preference for shorter pieces of footage? A preference that has developed, some say, from the practice of surfing on internet sites like YouTube?
Evans: There have been various formulas. YouTube, for example, is not a very old phenomenon, as I'm sure you know. It's been around since 2005 when it originally launched, 2006 maybe, so we're really only talking about five years that we've had video content on line. It's hard to imagine now the internet without video.
A couple of years ago, the common belief was that 30 seconds to a minute was about the longest video you could have on line that people would pay attention to; but, what's happening now as the technology advances, YouTube and Vimeo can show a video that's a lot longer than they used to be able to show in the past. People are getting used to watching longer videos on line because they've become used to downloading longer feature-length films, watching TV episodes on Hulu, so I think people have adapted to watching longer format video on line. That's not really the problem.
The problem is that—if you're a disposable film maker—how do you make something with your inexpensive camera that's going to keep people's attention for longer than a minute-and-a-half or so? In the past, most of the film's we've shown have had a 10-minute maximum, though most of the films we've shown have been in the range of 2-3 minutes. This year there are 2 or 3 films in the program that are well over 6-7 minutes and they're completely able to hold an audience's attention. So I think what's starting to happen is that we're moving out of an experimental phase where we thought, "Okay, I have an inexpensive camera. I can do whatever I want with it. I can put it up in an air balloon. I can tie it to my skateboard. I can tape it to the wheel of my car. I can do all these experiments to see what this shot looks like." Those were fascinating experiments; but, people are now using these devices to tell stories in a new way. A new vocabulary is emerging.
If you're using a webcam, it instantly speaks with an intimate, confessional tone. People are using that in strategic ways. Or if you have a cell phone, you can capture glorious footage for documentaries that couldn't have been captured otherwise. With the emergence of DSLRs in the last couple of years, you can get incredibly beautiful saturated footage and make a feature length film for the relatively inexpensive price of $1,000. The question then becomes how can you use all this equipment in ways that will tell a compelling story differently than the usual Hollywood formulas? This year we're really starting to see that shift. This has all been a long-winded answer to your question; but, the real trick is to engage and keep people's attention through innovative storytelling.
Guillén: I don't consider your answer long-winded at all; I think it's an exciting answer. What you're saying is that the Disposable Film Festival is advocating not only democratized access to these new technologies but a sophisticated application of them, plus a forum for the best to rise to the top.
Evans: Yes, absolutely.
Guillén: As a further commitment to that maturation, DFF is offering several free panels to the public to promote their mission statement. Can you talk a bit about those panels?
Evans: Yeah, sure. Friday evening we're having an industry panel of film professionals: "How to Become A Disposable DePalma". The idea is that we've had several local festival filmmakers go on to much bigger festivals like Sundance, Cannes and SXSW where they've received more attention for their films. What we're trying to do with DFF is help more filmmakers take that next step. You've posted your film online on YouTube or Vimeo and you've received positive comments from those communities, now what do you do? If you have a good film on your hands, how can you take it to the next level so you can reach a broader audience, enter into the film industry in some sense, and potentially even develop revenue for yourself? Friday night's panel will be an information panel to help filmmakers who are striving to turn filmmaking into a career by giving them tips and tricks. It's a panel that essentially will be forwarding information that DFF has already been doing in some ways for filmmakers.
The next panel is on Sunday at Oddball and it's on using inexpensive cameras to promote social action: "Lights. Camera. Social Action!" We're hosting a panel with professional activists who use film media and can speak to the value of using film media for their causes. That panel will then move into a workshop where people who are interested in creating advocacy films will be taught how to do them. There's a certain perception that the way to get people interested in a cause is to provide a lot of information about the cause, to provide all the facts about why, say, greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming, etc., etc.; but, in fact, that's not the case. What's proven to be the thing that draws people in the most is the personal story. So this panel will focus on teaching filmmakers how to tell that personal story to advance a social cause.
Guillén: Both panels sound great and I hope to attend them both. Of course, I admire DFF's focus on all the new media technologies and how you're physically interweaving them into the festival's social and interactive platform. The publicity for the festival on such social media as Facebook has been fantastic in how you've created separate pages for specific events. This might be a bit too obvious, but can you speak to the value of promoting and publicizing the festival through such social media as Facebook and Twitter?
Evans: It's all part of the same thing and it's one of the things that's wonderful about this moment in culture. People are making these videos with inexpensive equipment and then posting them on Facebook and interacting that way. It's just part of their reality. The amazing thing we discovered in that first year that we got out there was that people come to one of our events and after they leave they're inspired to make their own videos. It's a wonderful thing that the people who are making these films and the people who are watching them at our festival are one and the same people. There's an amazing fluidity between the filmmakers and the audience. In some ways some of the marketing strategies that we're using are not so much marketing as it is just recognizing these communities that are out there and tapping into them through Facebook, Twitter and other online social media. We're doing that because these people are exactly the people who are making and watching these videos and they're doing it constantly. It just seems natural. The whole thing comes together in this beautiful way that speaks against a fractured culture.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Attending last year's edition of the Disposable Film Festival (DFF) proved to be a delightful eye-opening experience. Without a doubt, it was the deciding factor in my purchasing an iPhone. Once I knew what could be done with it, I was eager to start playing. If DFF got an old codger like me motivated, imagine how it inspires young media makers?! Playfulness is the spirit presiding over DFF, which provides its annual forum of the year's best "disposable" films, free workshops to advance the disposable genre, and festive parties to socialize with the cast and crew. In the spirit of collaboration and egalitarian access, DFF deserves being dubbed by Moviemaker magazine as "one of the coolest film festivals."
Recounting territory covered by my conversation with DFF festival co-founder and Director Carlton Evans, DFF was created in 2007 to celebrate the artistic potential of disposable video—short films made on non-professional devices such as cell phones, pocket cameras and handycams, webcams, and other readily available video capture devices. DFF hosts traditional theater and outdoor "Bike-In" screenings, competitions, filmmaking workshops and other events to showcase the best work within the disposable genre. DFF premieres each year in San Francisco before traveling to cities across the country and internationally.
The year's festival opens on the heels of a year filled with new partnerships and exciting events. Highlights included a "Best of the Fest" screening at Slamdance, a partnership with Practice Fusion and health-related film contest, a co-presentation of user-generated feature-length documentary Life In A Day [covered by Evening Class correspondent Dominic Mercurio], Bike-Ins and international screenings.
Thursday, March 22: 8:00PM
Friday, March 23: 5:00PM
Friday, March 23: 7:00PM
Saturday, March 24: 4:00PM
Saturday, March 24: 8pm
Sunday, March 25: 12:00 noon
Sunday, March 25: 2:00PM
Sunday, March 25: 5:00PM
Sunday, March 25: 7:00PM
