In video, digital technology is where it’s at. And while you won’t see their names on the outside of your TV set, Silicon Valley tech companies are an integral part of the new world of digital video.
That was clearly the message at the second annual Silicon Valley Film Festival (www.svfilmfestival.org), held earlier this month at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Presented by Movie Makers Unite (MMU.com), the festival aims to spread the word that Santa Clara Valley’s combination of creative genius and innovation in technology fuses naturally with digital and 3-D filmmaking.
For two full days and evenings, nearly 100 movies, shorts, musicals, animation and realtime 3-D image generation – called machinima – were on display, followed by Q&A sessions featuring the filmmakers themselves.
Festival Founder and Director P.V. Moorthi PV hopes the SVFF will introduce the Silicon Valley community to creative artists utilizing new video technologies created locally. One example is the trailer for a new 3-D film, “Flamingo,” which was produced by Jim Cummings, owner of San Francisco 3D Films (www.sanfrancisco3dfilms.com). “3-D is the present,” says Cummings, but it will be surpassed as new technologies are created and adapted.
The festival featured a screening and discussion of the new thriller “Inside,” which its creators call Hollywood’s first “social interactive movie.” Also on the menu was a screening of “Bob Marley: The Making of a Legend,” a digitally re-mastered film charting the rise of reggae legend Bob Marley and his band, The Wailers.
The festival opened with a showing of the 2010 documentary, “The Shockley Tapes,” which looks at how the inventor of the transistor destroyed both his reputation and career by becoming what science historian Daniel Kelves called “a racist and biological ignoramus” – inferring, perhaps, that technologists should be careful about believing their own PR.