VideoTraces – Viral Competition
From silent movies to the talkies, from black and white to colour, digital technologies and 3D, movies are a process in constant evolution. In a time where everything needs to be outright accessible and the main information sites like Wikipedia can be modified and implemented by their users, also films can represent a stimulating means of innovation.
So, why not catch up with social networks, viral circulation and the creation of collective works?
These are the premises of our Viral Competition, born from the Festival’s will to offer a new perspective on the creative world in the age of internet and global communication, applied to the expressive means of short films.
For the Viral Competition we have chosen three topics, aimed at giving filmmakers the largest freedom of expression and involving them from a creative and social point of view, since all topic and ideas will be then discussed through the facebook page of the project.
From “Reinventing Images”, which encourages the use of new media and visual experimentation, to “The Nakedness of Objects”, which suggests social reflections on the meaning of an object and its value, and to “Wastes”, considered not only in a literal sense, but also as a metaphor of all that we repel, remove and forget (for better or for worse…).
Starting from these topics, we have asked filmmakers to shoot a “videotrace”: no more than 30 seconds, and with no dialogue.
The special programme will present all the videotraces participating in the competition, and will host a meeting with all the filmmakers, in order to discuss about new ways of making cinema and new forms of viral dissemination of creativity.
The audience will choose the best videotrace: but the viral competition will be just the starting point of a broader project.
All the videotraces will be shared through an online platform and the winner trace will be the cue and the “matrix” for further developments and for a new competition, planned for the 2013 edition of the Festival. Each filmmaker will decide how to connect the 30 seconds trace to a new short film: the connection can be either a character, an object, an environment, but also a noise or a narrative cue.
The Viral Competition is unique because it does not intend to be a creative workshop limited in time and space: rather, it aims at offering artists a platform that allows a continuous exchange and the chance to share their ideas and their work with other filmmakers, students and spectators.
