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As part of our inquiry into the aesthetics of on-line film making we feature films that have been made specifically for the web. There is no particular style or type of film featured, the only important thing is that the filmmaker has born the medium in mind when making their film. Enjoy the films and let us know what you think; better still send us yours!  You
will need Real Player to view the following movies, if you don't have it click
on this link:
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A beautiful short film created from a collection of abstract charcoal drawings produced by Bristol based artist David Shutt over a period of 3 years. Intense detail flashes by at a blinding pace, inspired by Techno music and Nietzsche. "After I finished my degree 3 years ago, I continued to make the abstract charcoal drawings which during the time of my degree had only really been a sideline. The charcoal drawing much as I enjoyed doing it, was something I felt discouraged from following through on the course since I didn't really feel that is satisfied the intellectual climate." "The animation, which is just the starting point for a lot more work, came about through a desire to take what I saw as the impetus behind my drawings and translate it into a more dynamic form. The sentiment that I would most like to express with my work is this - to truly change, to truly embrace what is other, to long for this is to break with what I am, to transcend what Nietzche calls "the will to nothing"."
This lovely short film/musical sees the the residents of a lowly Bristol street erupt into seasonal song. First shown on the Watershed's Electric December digital on-line advent calendar back in 2002, the plugincinema collective had to create a short piece to be viewed on the web that had a Christmas theme and somehow involved the local community - the result as you can see, is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek take of a well known Chrsitams carol.
This collection of very short moives are a variation on the ASCII-Art theme, and a possible first - movies viewable on the internet without any plugin technology at all! "Each HTMovie is a sequence of approximatlely twenty 60 x 45px frames of animation. Using the GD2 graphics extension, a PHP script loads each frame up in turn and creates a text representation of the frame using the 'ImageColorAt' function. Armed with this information I can output a HTML # character in the correct colour mapped from the respective point in the image. Each HTML frame which is created is placed on an individual Javascript layer with its Visible property set to hidden. Finally, some simple Javascript is required to cycle through each frame in turn and setting it to visible whilst keeping the rest hidden. This then achieves the effect of animation."
Stummfilm (or Silent Film) is a Flash animation that cleverly utilises still images and sound to create a dramatic and educational experience. It was first releases in November 2002 where it was viewed by over 2000 on-line users. It has also been shown in media art exhibitions and festivals around the world which appreciate the experimental capacities of webfilms. "This work uses didactic strategies to deconstruct language and humour. The interest and attention of the jury were most captivated by this work, which is simple in both form and message. By refusing the unnecessarily complex use of technology, it throws a monkey wrench into the hi-tech agenda of other contemporary works." (Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media, 2003)
"Distance Over Time is part of my research into making appropriate content for delivery over the Internet. Distance Over Time is about the concept of travel or movement. It contrasts moving footage taken from different forms of transport with the self determined, mechanical movement of objects. The film moves through time and space multilayering images and sound as it moves faster and faster towards the end of its journey. The film is intentionally experimental and conceptual using the shape, colour and pace of the images as the formal structure. It was filmmed using a Canon Powershot S200 digital stills camera at a very low resolution (160 x 120) and edited in AfterFX. There are two different versions here; one 56k version and one for broadband (256k). Although I experimented with various codecs and file formats, Real is the one that gave the type of compression and image/sound quality that I preferred."
The Wassup Team and onickz from France present a nice short film taking us through a selection of old school skateboarding tricks. The visual effects used are very effective and the soundtrack is by none other than Gang Starr. For more information and films by onickz visit www.onickz.com.
"George is my cat. She is 20 (human) years old and very fluffy - still." George - The Mewvie is an experimental film as part of Ana’s research into filmmaking for the net. It was shot in DV using a Sony PD100 and edited on a Sony Vaio using Adobe AfterEffect 5.0. Within AfterEffects the DV footage was previewed at ¼ the usual screen resolution, which gave a good impression of what the final film would look like - once it had been encoded/compressed for streaming to 56K modems.
Carolyn is an artist who in recent years has turned to digital video as her main medium. Her work is non-narrative and, most recently, responds to subtleties in everyday life, drawing the viewers’ attention to the details. "I use digital technology mostly as a video-editing tool. I like to think of creating web specific work as being 'concrete poetry - without the concrete'..." For more information visit www.hybrideyes.com or contact Carloyn Black. For an interivew with Carolyn Black see the plugincinema Aesthetic.
Deathsucker is a music video which works really well as a low-bandwidth 'web film'. The footage was all filmed underwater (with help from Ana Kronschnabl) and alongside the music (produced by Parasite) adds to the eerie feel of the piece. In the words of Andy: "I think that the most fun aspect of it was trying to make a visually arresting piece using only footage filmed in a bath using simple natural lighting effects such as from an oil lamp and candles. A recipe for much fun and a lot of mess. Some of the original footage had almost no dynamic range whatsoever, but using After Effect I was effectively able to 'push process' most of the footage to give a gritty and grainy effect that I think complements the music. Overlaid with the footage of the heads, hands and toys under water there are continuously playing tracks of caustic lighting effects and bubbles, hopefully acting as a unifying watery theme. On a technical level it was filmed on PAL DV using a Sony TRV-900E and a Sports housing to film underwater, and all post-production was done on a Dell laptop with a nice fast Maxtor DV hard drive. The footage was re-timed, filtered and heavily regraded using After Effects 4, then layered and edited using Premiere 6. It really is a dream being able reprocess and edit DV quality footage on such a simple system!"
Mutant Boy is a short Flash film made by a local (Bristol) animator Neil Webber. The story follows the journey of a small boy from the local store to his house, where he gorges on junkfood. Neil pays real attention to detail and the soundtrack adds nicely to the eerie atmoshpere of the animation. Beware! powerstations and junkfood can have disastrous results! You can reach Neil at neil.webber@ic24.net.
Run is a short film made when Vincent experimented with the idea of turning DV footage into vector art. It is 3 minutes long and was created in AfterEffects with Photoshop, Illustrator and Streamline. Vincent Scotti is a motion graphic artist based in Montreal, Canada. You can reach him at vincentscotti@yahoo.com or visit his website www.vincentscotti.com.
This festive Flash film was made by the plugincinema collective for an on-line advent calender called electric december, which features digital work from local Bristol artists. The story tells the tale of an unhappy elf who is tired of making toys for the Christmas Corporation. On it's way home one evening it spies a piece of Banksy graffiti and gets inspired. The following day it goes on a mission to subvert the corporate images of Christmas.
The Funeral is a moving short film by two Russian brothers Leonid & Sergius Tishkov, which documents the aftermath of Christmas for the ill-fated Christmas Tree. Here we see images of dead, rotting evergreens and the remnants of discarded festive decorations. These striking images force the viewer to contemplate the mass destruction of trees that takes place every year.
In 1969 David Oluwale became the first black person to die in police custody in Britain. Many others have died since then. None of the police officers involved have been convicted of these deaths. In this documentary, the families of these victims ask "Why not?" This is a blow by blow account of the relentless struggles of the families as they find out how they lost their loved ones in extremely violent deaths at the hands of police officers. Each family is met with a wall of official secrecy and the film documents how they unite and challenge this together. The documentary uses powerful exclusive footage filmed over a five year period and witnesses the families pain and anger at the killings. It documents the fight to retrieve the bodies for burial, the mockery of police self-investigation and the collusion of the legal system in the deaths. This is a 4 minute trailer from the original film. For further information visit the Injustice website or contact info@injusticefilm.co.uk.
You will need Flash to watch this film. The short film Moonstruck attempts to deliver something more drama oriented than what has been created with Flash in the past. It seems all over the web, one finds Flash animation's that are meant to be seen for it's celebrity bashing and pointless use of violence. Though this sort of entertainment has it's place and audience, it seems one has to dig deeper to find work that has meaning. I sincerely hope that we see more creative people using Flash to tell stories that are individual and poignant. Moonstruck is an attempt to do this, and I hope it succeeds in saying something that is different to each viewer. The simplicity of the piece was definitely intended from the beginning to encourage just that. The short was created in Flash due to the fact that it is basically a film makers dream. Visuals, audio, and distribution are conveniently taken care of by one program. Of course this is just my opinion, but consider the positive things of Flash. You can create crisp, sharp images and play animation at between 12 - 18 frames a second depending on what you are doing within a scene. Once finished, upload to a site like plugincinema.com and you have an audience that can see your work around the world by means of the Flash plug-in which is quite common. While doing Moonstruck I often wrestled with the idea of exporting to video and bringing the project into After Effects for more fun, and think there could be many advantages to using both programs to create a final piece. The downside to using flash as a viewing format is that it doesn't seem to support higher frame rates than 18 fps. I dream of the day when the Flash player supports 24 fps. then we'll really see something!
You will need Flash to watch this film. Ian writes: "I have built and run a software development company, until recently when I sold my controlling stake to an investment consortium. Disillusioned with Corporate life, I asked myself quot;What do I really want to do?quot; I mean want to do rather than need to do. Like most people; I have always had an interest in Visual media, whether that be photos, film or paintings. When these are combined with other media such as sound and animation the results can be memorable. So I decided that I would make a short web movie. I looked around for short scripts but couldn't find anything that could be produced on a zero budget. I had a book of poetry that I would read at bedtime, and some of the poems I found beautiful." "The poem "In Flanders Fields" and the circumstances in which it was written moved me. I did some research amongst young people and was horrified to find that most didn't even know when the first world war occured yet alone had heard of the poem. It doesn't touch young people at all, especially as Hollywood is not interested in this period of History. Have you noticed the generation gap at the Rememberence Day parades?""So our objective with this web movie is to encourage new people to be acquainted with these times, and perhaps encourage them to find out more. Maybe they will understand the need for remberence parade days. We have received many (unsolicited) emails from people simply saying "Thank you" and I honestly haven't ever received such a genuine and positive response from anything I have done before, in the six years that I have been involved in "new" media. I would love to do this full time, but I haven't figured out how to make a living from it yet!".
This animation is part of a series (made for the internet), and is based upon drawings and sketch designs, and are carried out on computer in a combination of programs, (Adobe illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Bryce, Macromedia Director, Adobe Premier etc.). "This new work, I feel is more like composing music with motion, of dancing figures sharing the same rhythmic patterns. Within the abstract form, I try to make a connection from one structure to the other by creating gradual transitions, within a sequence of frames, where every frame is placed in the right order...... I hope everything works out well." Paul Ritt To see more films by Paul Ritt visit www.ritt.tk.
Fighting Women II is the continuation of a project Ana started in the spring of 1998. The result of this was a half hour documentary that was screened at the Northern Lights Film Awards. Since then Ana's attention has been focused on producing films for the Internet. Fighting Women II is an attempt to create a short web piece that still has many of the concerns of the original documentary but promotes them in quite a different way. Fighting Women II has a multi-layered soundtrack as well as a multi-layered visual track. "We started with the soundtrack, building a solid soundscape on which to place the visuals. Since it was important to still convey some of the meaning of the original, parts of dialogue were taken from the documentary soundtrack and woven into a 'track', more like the way I'd approach a 'pop promo' than a traditional documentary." This was emphasized by co-creating the sound with sound artist Parasite. So, much of the meaning was created by weaving together snippets of dialogue and music. The visuals were from a variety of sources including Beta SP footage, Super 8 and sequences taken from the computer game Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast. Ana's aim was to show the diversity of influences and different ways that women's lives are touched by Martial Arts. The film tries to reflect some of these influences, in a nonjudgmental, poetic way.
Snowangel is a collection of two short films by Russian filmmaker Sergius Tishkov. The scene is set in a beautifully bleak landscape, where we follow the trail of an angel through the snow.
Abstraction was an experimental way of using a composite of Digital stills and DV Footage to try and convey the feeling of time and the way our minds pick up details of the world around us; like screen flicker on a TV screen or pause on a video, our memory picks up details in the same way, static fragments of our feelings and memory. The audio is an integral part of the footage and the deep levels convey feelings of panic,stress and various What's! and Why's!
The 15 minute "Doodius" (1998) was Doodi's next film, in which he played one of two slaves who escape from slavery and form a resistance group in Rome. Huw Jones joined the production, and a young actor named Tommus made his debut as Doodi's best friend. The 13 month shoot proved strenuous for everyone, but Tommus and Doodi's off-set antics eased much of the tension.
This video short is part of a three-part video installation "Panoptic Machine", shown earlier this year as part of the 'workplace' exhibition in Bristol. The body of work is a response to Templar House, the building in which it was installed. A concrete block of corridors and staircases housing a range of offices and light industrial units, it evokes a constant sense of being watched. This film was shown alongside a live relay of the viewer looking through a peephole, only to be confronted by the eye blinking at them and the profile of their own eye looking through the hole. Another film, seen through another peephole, showed surveillance-type footage of the empty building with voice and text alluding to the uncomfortable atmosphere of the site. The Morse code soundtrack translates to 'access denied'. www.hybrideyes.com
plugincinema.com featured at the Brief Encounters Film Festival in Bristol during November 2000. plugincinema's Tomas Rawlings gave a lively presentation featuring many of the works from the Web site. Ana Kronschnabl who runs plugincinema, was interviewed by HTV as part of their coverage of the film festival. Here is a clip from the programme showing Ana give an overview of the Web site, as well as cooking up a DV storm in the kitchen!
This film is an experiment in on-line, low-bandwidth/resolution filmmaking using Tony Hawk's Skateboarding as the original inspiration. I got some mates to play the game..to varying levels of ability, and then recorded the footage onto VHS. I then edited the bits together using Premiere and some snazy transitions I acquired. I used some original music by Parasite to edit the footage to, using traditional skateboarding videos as a model. The idea was to create a gutsy, lively and entertaining film using engines from a computer game that could create low bandwidth/quality images that would be fitting to be screened on the net. One of the things I really like about it is the extreme pixellation in places where it has undergone quite dramatic compression for the web...it really adds to the grungy feel.
As part of our feature on Machinima, this short is an excellent example of using computer generated characters to create a film. Written by Dan Harmon, Summoner Geeks is a typically funny role playing senario. Animation by Tim borrell, modelling & other visuals by Peter Han, Josh Nizzi, Frank Capezzuto & Mike Comet. Voices by Dan HArmon, Rob Schrab, Peter Alberts & Mondy Carter. The Kit is a technology TV series shown weekly on BBC 2. In this episode the subject is "The Future of Cinema" and we meet Ana Kronschnabl, creator of plugincinema.com, who talks about the possibilities of providing quality film over the internet. Straight off the boat from Belfast, Kate has planned to marry Denny at Gretna Green. After almost a year apart and under Kate's latent influence, Denny has given up his work and home, preferring the simple life in a static caravan. Over 24 hours, Kate grows to appreciate the changed Denny, as they both face up to the fact there will be no marriage in the morning.
This is a humorous short film about two lads who go camping together. The scene is set the morning after the night before. IodineMedia is a trans media production company who make films, commercials, animations and websites. For more information visit there website www.iodinemedia.co.uk, or contact ed@iodinemedia.co.uk.
Cathedral III is about life (and more) seen through the dying eyes of every person. These are all surreal/experimental films that try not to use the typical linear storyline of cinema. As a result they all need a bit of work from the audience.
This short film was made as an exercise in compressing time, it may also work well as an 'e-film'. See what you think :)
In
this instance we have used chance to generate the structure for the films, not
narrative or time as in more traditional pieces. |
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cinema
Transformatins
by David Shutt
Silent
Night by plugincinema
HTMovies
by Japanese Freeware
Distance
Over Time by Anakissed
Half
Cowboy - An Old School Trick by onickz
George
- The Mewvie by Anakissed
Frenzy
by Carolyn Black
Deathsucker
by 
Run
by Vincent Scotti
Tuned
by Paul Ritt
The
following films are short experiments in creating randomly generated pieces for
viewing specifically on the Internet.
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