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 […]

When I was a kid I hated videogames. Taking the controller at Pacman or Space Invaders or Frogger or whatever, I became nearly paralyzed with anxiety. The game started, and there you were: Go! Perform! Win! Within seconds, I’d lost. Game over. Total humiliation. Try not to let the other kids see your shame. I was also the kid who rarely did homework and responded to every failed test with, “I didn’t really try.” In other words, I’ve had a rocky relationship with failure in my life. Where was Jesper Juul when I needed him? Juul is one of the […]

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 […]

E3 is the big videogame industry show, where all the console makers and big publishers show their wares for the year to come. The big news this year was the next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony. It was a week of epilepsy-inducing noise and lights and people shouting at each other about AMD chips, Radeon graphics processors, dualshock controllers and how the latest versions of Warfare this or that will blow your mind. The news that caught my eye, however, happened in a parking lot across the street from E3. But let’s start at the beginning. In 1977, Atari set […]

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 […]

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 […]

Tuesday night Facebook hosted a panel discussion about social issue-oriented transmedia at their office in midtown Manhattan. The event was co-sponsored by the Tides Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that funds philanthropic ventures, and featured Beth Janson, executive director of the Tribeca Film Institute and representing its All Access program, Didi Bethurum of the social action campaign 10×10 and the documentary Girl Rising, Michelle Byrd of Games for Change, and Libby Leffler, Facebook’s Strategic Partner Manager who interfaces with nonprofits, charities, and philanthropic causes. A lot of the work discussed by the panel comes in the wake of the Half […]