A film festival that goes beyond the latest movies and concentrates on the future of film is starting today on the you see San Diego campus. The visual images concepts and story telling explored in the Filmatic Festival Festival may be quite unlike anything you've seen before. There will be presentations on the visual aspect of music and science along with an acclaimed experiment of a live documentary. Joining me with more about the festival is Rebecca Web, you see San Diego's Artpower film curator and founder of the Filmatic Festival Festival. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Marine. I'd like to start online with us is Sam Green, screening is live documentary called the measure of all things. In the clip from the film we meet record holders, first the woman with the longest name. Can introduce myself and say my home them? Hello. My name is [Name indiscernible] For over 16,300 days plus, now, I put my shoes on, tied them on and went for a run. That's what this week is. About the fourth or fifth day, I said, are you kidding me? This is hard. By then, it had gotten to the newspapers and the wire services picked it up and it was to Slate. I couldn't back out. There I was stuck in this thing. Let's do it, let's do the 11 days. [ Music ] [Name indiscernible] Williams. [Applause] That is a clip from the documentary the measure of all things. We also met the man with the longest running streak and the longest time awake. Sam Green, this is called a live documentary presented with a live narration. Welcome to the show, by the way. What you think the live narration adds to the film? First of all, very nice to be on the show. Happy to talk to. We are excited about doing the screening. Live events, people are hungry for it. Ultimately, we watch movies alone on our lap took -- laptops while checking Facebook. There's something missing in that way of watching things. Being in a theater with other people and live music, a movie that will never be seen the same way twice is kind of special, these days, I think. A measure of all things will be screened at the Filmatic Festival as the finale event on Sunday. Sam Green, thanks for joining us. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Rebecca Web is here, founder of the Filmatic Festival along with filmmaker Cy Kuchenbaker. A short film series San Diego studies will be screened at the festival. This is a second year of the festival. What is the theme? The theme is time and velocity. We've expanded the festival to look at the intersection of science, cinema and technology. We are presenting work that relates to the future of filmgoing and participatory experiences. How does what's being presented at the festival actually highlight the ideas of time and velocity. We take work, time and velocity, how does time collapse or move forward or the pace at which we look and watch something or the way work is presented at the Temple of the way work is presented. Cy, or Sears is called San Diego studies. They've racked up millions of views on lines. Can you describe them for us? I'm using special effects and synthesizing document early filmmaking. To reorganize it in a way that the audience can see at a pattern. Otherwise it's invisible because it takes too much time to see it. Taking airplanes landing for four hours and take out the gap so you see them happen all together and 30 seconds. What you see and that 30 seconds looks like a commercial airline [Laughter] Flyover. Yes. A squadron, really. I was excited about making them because I'm also surprised by the product. I can look at this, the original materials and guess what it might become. The most important thing about them is that they speak to the city's scale, the rhythms of the city and the size of the city, which is exciting. And you take a large amount of film footage of airplanes landing at Lindbergh Field all day long and then you make a 32nd film out of that, I would imagine that would be part of what you call collapsed time? This is language I had to come up with to help people understand. I called at a time collapsed the video because people called them time lapse which is a slightly different technique. We are all familiar with the idea of a plant growing all at once where it takes days and days. I was us different? The trick is, I show objects moving at their natural speeds. They are not accelerated. The time between has been subtracted. To do this, it's an intensive post-construction process. I start with three hours of footage in six months later it's 30 seconds long. You been simmering at all that time? Separating and going frame by frame to get it to a much tighter composition. Rebecca, the Filmatic Festival delights in blurring the lines between art and science and other cross disciplinary work. Why is that part of the future of film? As part of the future of film because, as even Cy mentioned -- Sam mentioned -- people are hungry for experiential, sensory experiences. They are home watching movies on phones and laptops and the idea of immersing and participating in this kind of film experience is really exciting and what will bring people out. It is a way to really understand the message and the idea that the filmmaker or scientists is trying to get across. You do have a lot of scientist involved in this? We have over 90 artists, in general, including scientists. I say artist's, because scientists represent their ideas visually and communicate scientifically. So, a large part of our artist -- are group of artists, are scientists. Break it down for me, of you would. They research that you see San Diego and actually want to visualize the concepts there working on by creating films? Yes. Their cinematic in nature. We have an event called assembly tonight, it screens at 6:15. Professor Sheldon Brown has an interactive cinematic experience to use your app to navigate through molecular worlds and it's quite stunning. Conceptually, very interesting. The audience gets to participate in an ecosystem and transform an ecosystem. It's very scientific. Requires scientific understanding to create this world, but it reads cinematically. There is a story behind it. The idea of cinema is storytelling. Scientists are storytelling and a cinematic realm. There's also a slow art film series. What is that? Area, very exciting. That was co-curated and we have a series of video and films that is a mentioned before, this idea of looking, what does looking mean? Especially in the fast-paced society of a three second view of a painting or image. It asked the audience to to slow down to look carefully and a meditative state, to look at this work. We have Godfrey, a famous experimental documentary filmmaker who is providing a rare experience at the Filmatic Festival. 'S film the visitors is about a trancelike engagement with technology. It is a comment on that. It's very beautiful and several other films and videos there -- that are a slower paced nature and ask us to look and participate. I'm interested in what you are doing with music. You present music visually in a number of different ways. One example is hearing landscapes. Professor Liang, multispectral, 20th century Chinese paintings. He creates a sonic soundtrack and we navigate through layers of paintings. It's quite a beautiful experience and that will take place on Saturday. Cy, what do you see as the experiments that you are doing, the films you are doing, what does that lend itself to the future of film? Which direction do you see that going in? It's a really, really exciting time for a film. The Filmatic Festival is especially exciting in San Diego because it's very accurate in what it represents. The film -- film is about to change in very significant ways. It's a great opportunity for people to walk in and see it. The future of film is not a straight line, it's multiple possibilities. It's an extraordinary future for the artform. It breaks down 30 or 40 possibilities. No one knows where it's going and it's an amazing amalgamation of different toolsets that normally don't mix. Videogame designers and filmmaker sharing tools, etc., etc. It's an extraordinary time for the artform in this festival, more than any I'm aware of, represents those possibilities. What does it do when anybody can make a film, now? 70 things that happen. Just in the last seven years. I will give you a simple example of the new outcomes. Because there is so many people making films, now, the toolmakers have reoriented themselves. It used to be a tool was made for very large companies. In the last five years you see a giant new economy serving regular folks, but making amazing new tools. But people do with them is strictly creative. It is the artform. It's sort of broke the artform open to regular people in a way that maybe the printing press or other things to other art forms hundreds of years ago, at different times. The democratization of film really happened because we have distribution now. We have postprocessing available, editing tools. The cameras are extraordinary and only getting better. Rebecca, as Cy alluded to, there are many events at the Filmatic Festival. There are so many, they might seem overwhelming. Where should people start? That is a great question. It does seem overwhelming when you look at the schedule. It is broken down into several programs that are very accessible. We have sonic experiences, virtual reality experiences, film and video. We have student work. Faculty is represented throughout this, as well as global artists. Really, it's just -- what are your -- take a look at what your interests are. If you are interested in three dimensional sound, maybe a sonic experience is for you in the sonic lab. Or, if you want to check out the latest virtual-reality headsets, that maybe of interest to you. Take a look at the schedule, the day by day schedule, and find where your interests lie. Tonight, we start with an amazing keynote team, a marriage of science and art right before your eyes. The professor from the Salk Institute and Alex McDowell, a keynote speaker from the Institute and production designer for famous directors will speak about world building and the future of narrative storytelling. I will talk about the festival, as well. Baby that's the best place to start. It begins today, the festival begins today at you see San Diego. I've been speaking with Rebecca Web of the Filmatic Festival and filmmaker Cy Kuchenbaker. Thank you so much. Thank you, Maureen.
ANCHOR INTRO: UCSD’s Artpower film curator Rebecca Webb wanted to create a festival that would explore the future of film going. KPBS arts reporter Beth Accomando says the result was the Filmatic Festival now in its second year and running this Thursday through Sunday at UCSD. The second annual Filmatic Festival serves up 40 events over the next four days at multiple venues. Festival founder Rebecca Webb says it’s all about the intersection of science, cinema and technology as it relates to filmgoing. REBECCA WEBB: Today’s scientist are representing their ideas visually and communicating their ideas cinematically, in turn, science and technology is feeding the way artist are expressing their ideas visually and the way our audience are experiencing this new technology and way of storytelling. Webb says it’s a big event but it’s broken down into tracts of programming focusing on gaming, audio experiences, virtual reality, and slow art. But it all explores the future of storytelling. Beth Accomando, KPBS News.
UCSD’s Artpower film curator Rebecca Webb wanted to create a film festival that would explore the future of film, and what the experience will be for filmmakers and filmgoers. The result was the Filmatic Festival, now in its second year.
The Filmatic Festival serves up 40 events (including panels, workshops, interactive experiences and film and video screenings) from Thursday to Sunday at multiple venues. Webb said it’s all about the intersection of science, cinema and technology as it relates to film-going.
“Today’s scientists are representing their ideas visually and communicating their ideas cinematically,” Webb said. "In turn, science and technology is feeding the way artists are expressing their ideas visually and the way our audience are experiencing this new technology and way of storytelling."
Webb is especially excited about the fact that the core of the festival will focus on faculty work at UCSD.
“There’s an incredible breadth of work going on in the intersection of science, arts, and technology and cinema, and so we are focusing on what’s happening right on campus,” Webb said.
The sidebar of programming, called Sonic Experiences, highlights a number of UCSD’s finest. Music professor Peter Otto will present “Audio Spatialization Lab: 24.”
Spatial 3D sound labs allow attendees to experience cutting edge demos of sound design and delivery, including compact beam forming arrays that are soon to be consumer products and a 24-channel surround sound system.
Qualcomm Institute composer-in-residence and UCSD professor of music Lei Liang will present new musical compositions to accompany high-resolution, multispectral scans of 12 Chinese landscape paintings by 20th-century artist Huang Binhong.
Liang is developing new concepts of sonic “shadows” and “lights” to create a musical language for orchestration and sound spatialization.
The presentation allows one to “navigate through the layers of the painting while listening to the music, and they are very harmonious together and it’s quite an extraordinary experience,” Webb said.
New Integrations in Telematics is also part of the Sonic Experiences. It showcases musicians and videographers performing live in San Diego and Zurich. Professor Mark Dresser, of the UCSD Music Department, is working with a team of people to create a concert that includes “Three Stories,” a composition by Gerry Hemingway that combines video and spoken text in an homage to filmmaker Chris Marker.
Filmatic Festival will also focus on student work, both students assisting faculty projects and also creating their own interesting work. On Friday, student films will be highlighted in the eighth annual Up and Coming Film Festival. Graduate and undergraduate work will be screened and awarded prizes, and filmgoers will have a chance to meet many of the filmmakers.
Webb was inspired to create the Filmatic Festival after a convergence of events.
First, she observed how people were watching more and more films on their phones and tablets, yet she also noticed how people still loved the communal experience of seeing a film in a darkened theater with a community of others. And then she read a New York Times article featuring filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas where they talked about the demise of the film industry and the emergence of mega blockbusters. And they said the future is about the way audiences are immersing themselves in all dimensions and that is the future.
“I thought this is really interesting,” Webb said. “I want to explore that future, that future really interests me, where is film going and what will be our experience of it for filmmakers and filmgoers. Filmmaking is really revolutionary now for the way we are telling stories.”
Filmatic Festival is also showcasing the work of former UCSD research scientist Todd Margolis. His work is called Special Treatment. It is described in the program as: “an immersive and interactive Virtual Reality installation examining the strength and persistence of memory. Inspired by the black and white image processed PHSCologram, ‘The Barracks,’ created by (art) and the Shoah Foundation, a chilling ride by train car deposits viewers in a sparsely populated camp, pieced together from original plans, photographs and other visual artifacts from Auschwitz II/Birkenau, Poland.”
The Filmatic keynote speakers will be Alex McDowell and Sergei Gepshtein. They will address the future of filmgoing and “the multiple threads that characterize visual experience in both natural and cinematic perception.”
McDowell, who has worked with Tim Burton and David Fincher, is a co-founder and the creative director of the 5D Institute, an education space for an expanding community of storytellers in industry and academia. Gepshtein is a scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, trained in neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and vision science, and is involved in developing new methods of perceptual continuity for immersive environments and cinema.
Another sidebar that challenges the way we experience art is the Slow Art Series. Michael Snow’s experimental film “Wavelength” (from 1967) will be shown on 16mm.
“It’s part of our slow art series that looks at the tempo of films as well as the audience’s relationship to film and the tempo of looking because these days we’re all looking at things that go in three seconds flat and then moving on, and this asks us to participate and slow down,” Webb said.
Filmatic Festival may seem big and sprawling with 40 events over four days, but Webb said it is organized by tracts of interesting programs “that based on your taste you might find a gaming showcase really interesting or virtual reality experiences where you get to try a virtual reality headset like Oculus Rift” to narrow the focus of the festival to make choices easier.
