Talk to an independent filmmaker these tales and at some point in the conversation you’ll find out they are working on a web series. (Or, at least that’s been the case for me when I bumped into a recent 25 New Face here in New York and a filmmaker colleague in San Francisco last week.) But the web series/feature film continuum can work in reverse too. “The Angry Video Game Nerd” web series has been covering the world of video games since 2006, with its host Cinemassacre YouTube channel having almost 1.5 million subscribers. For the last two years, AVGN […]

Zero Point, a meta-documentary about the virtual reality industry, is about to remove the popular practice of 3D filmmaking from theaters. Founded by Oscar-nominated director Danfung Dennis, the tech company Condition One has created the first film to be viewed with Oculus Rift, those nifty goggles made for 3D gaming. The virtual reality headset will allow the viewer to control the visuals through movement — effectively positioning the audience as a character, or even a real-time cinematographer, in the film. Condition One plans to project Zero Point on “the inside of an imaginary sphere, surrounding a viewer with an [Oculus] Rift headset,” according […]

From Cinefix, here is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining reimagined, with surprising effectiveness, as an 8-bit video game. (Hat tip: Daring Fireball.)

Tokyo Sally is the second narrative feature by director-cinematographer-editor Kal, after his 2010 debut Superhero in the Rain. He’s also a prolific producer of music videos, documentaries, and spots for companies like the Food Network. The Tokyo Sally project, which features Anna Adams, consists of one 60-minute film and a related app, Tokyo Sally: Lost Highway, both of which are nearing completion. Kal envisions the film as the first in a series of ten pictures that will explore different aspects of horror and suspense films; each will be self-contained but, when seen together, will relate to a larger story. The film […]

Right now the answer is not entirely clear. The Xbox One, which was unveiled in a presentation last week, represents Microsoft’s latest bid for domination of the living room through a single multipurpose device. It’s not a complete reinvention of the Xbox brand, but it integrates and advances several technologies Microsoft has been working on over the years. Microsoft’s accompanying efforts to expand away from hardcore gaming into other areas of entertainment such as streaming video make it a viable contender to the PS4, Apple TV, and other devices/platforms. Here’s the video of the device’s entire reveal. The discussion of […]

The distance between video games and cinema has been shrinking for years. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the presentation of Beyond: Two Souls last Saturday during the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend, an event billed as the first time a video game has ever been shown in a film festival. Certainly in the packed SVA theater, past the red carpet for actors like Ellen Page and after the enthusiastic introduction by Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Gilmore, it felt like a convergence of the two media that we haven’t seen before. This isn’t a game based on a movie […]

There’s no good way to summarize the plethora of information presented last Saturday at TFI Interactive, a full-day conference held, for the second time, during the Tribeca Film Festival. Organized by the omnipresent Ingrid Kopp (who was recently interviewed by the MIT Open Documentary Lab), the day took place at the IAC Building in lower Manhattan, not far from most of the festival’s screenings and the Storyscapes interactive exhibits that Kopp also curated. Over 20 presentations covered dozens of individual projects, discussed entities like Kickstarter, the NFB, and IDFA DocLabs, and included panel discussions on creating adventure video games (think The […]

Here are my weekly Sunday morning links. A sophisticated discussion of videogames and violence is contained in Adi Robertson’s “Death is Dead: How Modern Videogame Designers Killed Danger” at the Verge. The article quotes David Cage, whose Beyond: Two Souls is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, proclaiming, “If the character doesn’t hold a gun, designers don’t even know what to do.” That leads to a discussion about the relationship of death to videogame narrative: But unlike Cage, most of the writers giving talks at GDC don’t come into a game with complete control. They’re brought on to […]