Onedotzero to launch two special programmes

Digital moving image festival Onedotzero rolls into London this May for its ninth annual outing, showcasing the cream of innovative film, animation and motion graphics.

Onedotzero9 will run for nine days at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, beginning on 27 May. After this, it will embark on a national tour, taking in 15 cities across the UK.

According to the festival’s associate director Anna Doyle, use of the graphic image has developed immeasurably since the event began in 1996. ‘It has been almost ten years since Onedotzero started, and the graphic image has filtered out into so many areas [in digital film],’ she says.

Acknowledging this trend, this year’s festival highlights two emerging areas in digital moving image design, introducing the categories of documentary and graphic environments (both are working category titles).

The work showcased in the documentary category will demonstrate the blurring of the lines between factual and fictional elements. According to Doyle, some documentary film-makers have started to introduce animated components to their films, raising questions about the presentation or distortion of truth.

The strand explores this animated or graphic-fused variant in the documentary genre. An example is Cath Le Couteur and Yunus Akeseki’s Foot Cred film. This presents photographs of New York taken by music journalist Normski, alongside a monologue of his experience when buying a pair of Puma trainers in Soho.

The graphic environments category develops last year’s Graphic Cities collection, which examined graphic explorations of the urban environment and city. This year, the scope has been widened to include rural and virtual landscapes, says Doyle.

Berlin design and audiovisual collective Pfadfinderei collaborated with local duo Modelselektor to create a series of films in this area. One of these, Concrete Jungle, conjures an imaginary world ruled by graphics, pictures and music.

Onedotzero9 will also see the continuation of the festival’s well-established categories. Wow + Flutter presents motion graphics and graphic-led short experiments that play with narrative. Bernard Stulzaft’s Le Sens De La Vie shows the fate of a businessman who becomes enraptured by city greed.

Extended Play selects international digital shorts and animations that extend the boundaries of traditional storytelling and style. One film, The Eel, comes from UK effects specialist turned director, Dominic Hailstone. It is an eerie short about a monstrous creature breaking out of its constricting tank.

Innovative and risk-taking work is showcased in the Wavelength segment, which this year includes the Oceania video for Icelandic singer Björk, created by the architecturally trained Lynn Fox collective. Germany’s Zeitguised presents The Zoo, where machine forms are reconstructed and schematically exploded.

J-Star brings the latest work from Japanese film-makers, across music promos, narratives, commercials, short films and graphics and ident work.

The Onedotzero9 programme is compiled by Doyle and festival director Shane Walter. The festival is art directed by Philip O’Dwyer, co-director of State Design.