Onedotzero Adventures in Motion Festival
Last night saw the start of the weird and wonderful Onedotzero Adventures in Motion Festival at London’s BFI – a five-day festival celebrating innovation in digital culture and moving image arts.
The festival runs until Sunday, and marks Onedotzero’s 15th birthday. Presenting a plethora of compilation screenings, feature films, installations, live audio-visual performances, presentations and debate, this year’s festival looks to be better than ever – despite a difficult year that has seen the event’s Arts Council festival funding cut entirely.
Last night’s screening drew together some of the highlights across the Wow+Flutter, Wavelength, Extended Play and New British Talent sections of the festival.
Wow+Flutter looks at the future of moving image, showcasing motion graphics, animation and experimental short-form work. We loved the El Classico piece by Rohard Swarbrick – a Sky Sports commission portraying a football match in graceful, painterly style. Brushstrokes create a beautiful distillation of Barcelona beating rivals Real Madrid 5-0, making us almost (almost) take a passing interest in football.
Todor+Petru’s brilliant video for The Thunderclaps, in the Wavelength music video category, combines live action, stop-motion and cartoon animation, resulting in a lively, hilarious piece. Amazingly, the creators made the film while studying and interning, but the results show that the future for the duo is just as bright as the work they produce.
Another highlight was the equally hilarious (and also French) work from Megaforce, entitled The Greeks. A bunch of mean, dangerous schoolkids are seen terrorising suburbia with guns, drugs and ultra-violence – somehow marrying very cute kids with gangland danger.
Also scoring highly on the cute barometer is New Wenlock’s Apache video, shown in the Sprites section of family-friendly shorts. We see a little Native American and his Yeti pal strumming along to a song while turning on a revolving mountain platform. The characters take on all kinds of obstacles in their quest to reach the city, riding canoes, trains and mountain climbing, with a cheeky flash of a squaw’s breasts and a gently rocking soundtrack to boot.
Aside from the films, the BFI is also showing the Plasticity installation, created by Jane Grant, John Matthias, Nick Ryan of Fragmented Orchestra and Kin Design. The audio-visual installation piece works something like the electronic impulses in the human brain: sounds enter through microphones attached to a network of speakers and LED lights. The resulting sounds and visuals form previously unheard combinations of sound and light, meaning no two moments are ever the same.
Onedotzero runs until 27 November at BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road, London SE1
For more information visit the Onedotzero website
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