This week at the Nerd-O-Drome

In the hope of increasing the visibility of our little studio, I've asked the Bit Films Intern Supervisors (myself included) to gather some bit of production news from this week of work and let me throw it up on a blog post.

Cornucopia (Perry)

One big piece of news is that we've moved from "untitled feature project" to a acceptable working title. Eric and I finished the first complete draft of the film's treatment, and though it's full of problems, it's exciting to see it from beginning to end. Interns Marcel and Leo have been cranking out beautiful visual work that have really made the environments come to life. I've been working on some simple boards. Here are a few samples for you to enjoy:

a concept painting of the junkyard (Leo)

a concept painting of a growing vine (Marcel)

a rough board from act I (Perry)

Caldera (Viera & Bishop)

Team Caldera had a productive week. the last of the boards were drawn, the first render test was completed, and progress continued on layout and character modeling. Here are some images from the week:

a render of the cove environment (Viera, cove model by Jake)

an act III storyboard (Bishop)

Tube (Kurdali)

Bassam's got his own blog for the Tube project, and he provided a timely post today that covers his team's progress this week.

Other Interesting Stuff

Studio-wide, we also made major advances this week on launching Blender and After Effects renders from Helga. We have yet another new system for launching a general render, and this one seems to be the most functional yet. Heck, it can even handle the annoying stuff that has to happen to get aerender to actually render (please, Adobe folks who might be reading: make aerender actually launch from the command-line without needing any window server connections). More on this as it develops.

Also, excitement builds for next week's SIGGRAPH conference, where at least four of our summer crew will be relocating for the week. So things may be quieter than usual in the 'drome.

pre-SIGGRAPH

Excitement and frustration both as we prep for SIGGRAPH next week.

The excitement comes with the pending prize announcement (the student prize winner will be announced at the beginning of Monday August 3rd's Evening Theater screening). That same night, watch for the late-night Bit Films party; follow us on Twitter with your phone to catch the late-breaking announcement of when and where.

Be on the lookout for some new Bit Films schwag in New Orleans as well.

The frustration comes in that despite the nomination we have only two screenings during the week, and they're in the middle of the day on Monday. They've been added to the calendar.

TO BE CLEAR: The Incident at Tower 37 will be screening exactly twice at SIGGRAPH, in back-to-back programs during the day on Monday August 3rd.

The first show is a reel made up of all the award nominees (not just the student prize nominees, either). I'm going to guess that it'll be well-attended since it's the only time all week you can catch the nominees at one time. The second screening on Monday is a program called "Young at Heart." I'd like to see it too, but I'd also like to eat before the Evening Theater and the night of parties that follows. It's not unusual for me to be running entirely on fumes by the end of SIGGRAPH; looks like that might start earlier this year.

You may also find it playing in the Autodesk booth on the exhibition floor, but I certainly would try to catch one of the higher-quality screenings on Monday.

fall fest announcements

The fall schedule is beginning to get exciting. Tower 37 will be in the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, the Woodstock Film Festival in NY, and the Route 66 Film Festival in IL. All have been added to the calendar and will get more specific screening information once it is available.

new Bit Films website, Tower 37 snippet

I'm pleased to report the launch of the new Bit Films website, with a sleeker design, higher-quality videos, and a short snippet from Tower 37 to satisfy those who keep asking me "when can we see some of the film online?"

The new site also directs more attention toward the best sources for late-breaking Bit Films news, namely, this blog and the bitfilms twitter account.

www.bitfilms.com

Many thanks to Evan Viera, Dan Gilbert, and Ben Fiske for their help making this happen!

Laboratory Films shuts down

I received an email today saying that the first Laboratory Films production has been shut down. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you'll have to do some google searching and check for cached pages, since I think the "Pathfinder" (Twowan) for the production has done a remarkable, almost eerie, job of cleaning up after himself.

One part of his email motivated me to comment here:

If this production system does not require monetary capital, it does need great amounts of trust capital (goodwill). We need a massive amount of enthusiasm from a great number of artists right from day one. Being an unknown, whatever I do, I can never generate this amount of trust. Therefore, I would need a partner with an international filmmaking name who would bring credence to the enterprise.

I don't concur with this assessment. I avoided the project not because Twowan was an unknown, but because he worked so deliberately to keep himself (and the project) unknown. What I mean by this is that instead of making the work and himself and the project as visible as possible, it was kept secretive. The whole thing had a deceptive vibe surrounding it, when I think it needed more of a grass-roots, communal energy.

I would have voted for open, open, open. Put the work of the artists online, make it easy for people to see and get excited about the film. SHOW the progress and let the strength of the work do your recruiting for you.

But what about protecting intellectual property? Use an open source or CC license, even one of the most restrictive ones! This would allow for work to be posted publicly without fear. It would be foolish (and illegal) for someone or some corporation to take the work and then try to turn their own profit on it. And it would yell out trust rather than privacy and fear.

I watched the Laboratory Films project closely and with excitement. I'm sorry to see this iteration fail, but I hope there are future versions to observe and, possibly, contribute to.