FESTIVALS AND EVENTS

The Digital Future and Film?

(The Future Film Festival, Bologna, 2000)

How great is the contribution of computer generated visual effects in today’s films? How are they achieved, how are they utilized, how should they be used, are they merely technology or a language in their own right? These and many other questions were posed at the beginning of the year in Bologna, at the second consecutive Future Film Festival, a new review dedicated to new technology in animation.

Divided into several segments (The Digital Award, D. Film Festival /on the Internet/ and Future Film Short), this year’s review was more oriented toward new fields for computer applications, than toward feature films. In the program The French Road Toward the Digital, the work of several large French companies was screened. Digital Domain and ILM represented the American stars and stripes in the field of film production, and Walt Disney Imagineering in the field of theme parks. There was also a retrospective of Japanese robot-animation entitled The Past of the Future, along with a program dedicated to ’real’ cartoons called The Future of Toons.

Great hope was expressed regarding the Internet and on digital processes as one of the possible roads to help »liberate« film from the mainstream, and from the production to distribution limitations of the film industry, but the question remains as to whether contemporary audiences wish to watch films in cinemas or on computers.

Marin Lukanović