Singapore Entrepreneurs

Oct 31, 2008

Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008: Festival Film Screenings

The Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008 is an unique event which is part-conference, part-film festival and part-networking event, DMfest is where IT and media production professionals can engage in meaningful dialogue and discover synergies that will help propel them forward in this market. The event is organized by the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF). BL, our editor was invited to the festival film screenings held in National Museum and here are some highlights of the event.

The Singapore Digital Media Festival opened today in Gallery Theatre, National Museum with a festival film screenings that capture the interface between creative media and technology. It will be proceeded by a conference focussing on the theme “Television 2.0: Internet Services & New Media Mashup” in The Legends @ Fort Canning Park tomorrow.

The event started with an interesting opening ceremony with RADM (NS) Ronnie Tay (CEO, IDA Singapore), Tan Yen Yen (Chairman of Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation) and Ng Chong Khim (Chairman, Digital Media Chapter, Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation). The event is hosted by Genevieve Woo, the presenter and producer from ChannelNewsAsia. Formalities aside, it may be interesting to talk about how the evening went.

The festival film screenings take an interesting perspective on films created with the mix of technology and creative arts. For our editor, he managed to catch the first half of the screenings which centered on open source films (user generated films using open source graphics such as Blender), Machinima films (films created out of computer game animation), and live music films. The span for most films are short for the open source films, but in each closing credits, there are just more than a few hundred people involved in the process of making the film. While some might have difficulty appreciating Elephants Dream with two strange characters moving across a precarious and seemingly world dominated by a huge machine (similar to movies like Ghost in the Shell or the Matrix trilogy), the film “Big Buck Bunny” was amazing funny that got the audience laughing out loud.

The Machinima films were screened next, but the organizers only showed parts of the story due to time constraints. They showed Red vs Blue, a well known machima comic science fiction video series of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war, with a lot of pop culture jokes and sarcastic humour tossing up on the dialogue. Although a few of the audience caught most of the jokes and burst into laughter, it is quite obvious that not many appreciated the humour inside. BloodSpell was a more serious machima film except that it ended abruptly. It is interesting to note that we have not seen such types of creative films made in Asia. That is perhaps where the creative innovators should start looking at how to interface technology with good storyboards.

The highlight of the day was the interview with Mark Schubin, from Metropolitan Opera via a live linkup from the US. Before our host Genevieve took him through a short interview discussing how the Met has able to propagate the operas through the power of technology via satellite transmission and fibre optic cables to other parts of the world, we get the best selection of snippets from different opera done by them. Most of the interview centered on the challenges to convince people that they can get the same experience sitting in a cinema or lecture hall watching an opera transmitting from a live opera house and how to deliver that experience via technology. Of course, the challenge is to eventually use the internet as the platform to distribute the Metropolitan opera in such high quality or new ways of presenting different perspectives in the opera house to an audience who is physically not there.

For that matter, it has been a good evening and we will report more on the conference tomorrow. Here are some pictures for the event: