In a landscape as diverse as the Darklight Digital Film Festival it's reassuring to come across a title as welcoming as the Denim Queens Wet Dream. Spearheading the festivals identity and realising all of its own midnight dreams the Denim Queen captures the spirit of Darklight - remoulding traditional talent through a digital filter. Gary Quinn reports.
From today on, Darklight are broadcasting a five-step streaming media presentation, a mini-guide to the festival, and a glimpse of its own beating heart. The five clips introduce some of the brightest talent on show, including Academy Award Winning animation Bunny from Blue Sky Studios New York. A seven minute piece, it is the first computer animated film to use radiosity - a new word for a new medium - which in short is an advanced computer rendering technique which recreates the effects of natural light. Set in the kitchen of old and weary Bunny, the tale reveals a story of suspense and mistaken identity. It also features a large hairy moth. Guaranteed to fill seats and win hearts this short tale is a beautiful example of the future of computer animation - strong stories and seamless art, the computer is as hidden as the pencil and paper of less technology driven days.
Tom Comerfords fast paced short Pawn is sure to turn heads when it screens at the festival. Shot on 16mm and edited on Avid. In true graduate style it saw its creator take most of the lead roles on the production. Since getting to grips with the Avid system Tom Comerford has little desire to working on anything else. "I've used the various systems like Steinbecks and just found that I had much more control with the Avid. You could see where the story was going. Digital is the future but I can understand how some people might have some trepidation. If you have learned film techniques it can seem scary to transfer these to digital but the techniques are essentially the same," he explained. Taking a long-time interest in chess he transferred the black and white combat design of the game to the screen injecting heavy tension and fuel along the way. "Sometimes I think that the trailers for films are better than the films themselves and this was the idea behind the pace of Pawn. I wanted to make a film which was in essence a trailer while at the same time still being a film," he said.
And so to Denim Queen. Produced by Stephan O'Connell the film provided the impetuous to build a fresh new team of animators. Gerard Crowley, a cartoonist and Avril O'Brien a scenic artist worked with O'Connell's initial idea to produce the final film. The film is animated using Flash technology. "Having vastly limited resources I decided that Flash, being vector based, had just enough potential to do the trick," O'Connell explained. "Although not designed for the task which I was about to use it, it offered many favourable characteristics which would allow us the freedom to develop our own unique working methods - that is, to make it up as we went along," he explains with good humour.
Gerard Crowley first produced a story-board mapping out the idea. From this the team developed single character animations on paper which were traced onto a graphics pad and into Flash. These were then emailed to Avril O'Brien who cleaned up the drawings and coloured them. She then emailed these to Stephan O'Connell who assembled the live action sequences and emailed these back to the rest of the team. An exciting process which gave everyone individual freedom to create, but within a strong team environment. The results were immediately viewable as low resolution Quicktime movies. "We found that the Flash environment allowed us to create very complex and detailed sequences using many different layers within the individual symbols and to render a much more complex result than initially intended," O'Connell said.
Apart from Bunny the international contingent is also led by Spanish filmmaker Manuel Saiz rhythmic meltdown iLego. Saiz works in a range of media and is well known on the festival circuit in Europe. He wanted to take a familiar item like the childs playbrick Lego and challenge its rigidity and form. Using Adobe Premiere to edit and Moto DV Radius software his one line synopsis says it all - the unexpected behaviour of Lego pieces. The film details the meltdown and growth of lego on screen. "A technical approach to the idea of the co-existence of structure and chaos intended to be shown in a structured and chaotic atmosphere." he claims.
The final piece is Subway, an underground diary of the New York Subway system. Shot on DV by James Sommerville, it incorporates a not unfamiliar but dynamic title sequence. The split screen film technique will undoubtedly infuse documentary makers in the assembled audience. A clear outsider on the inside Subway will easily reach its station.
The closing message? The Darklight trailer works. The festival is exciting and the talent is fresh. Why? Because you can see it. Check it out for yourselves. Its there for the taking: darklight28.ram
darklight56.ram
The 2nd Darklight Digital Film Festival runs from the Thursday 25th to Sunday 28th May with screenings in the IFC, Exhibition and Music in Temple Bar.
Further information and booking at: www.darklight-filmfestival.com or telephone: 01 662 90 35
