Bitfilm Festival 2004
3rd - 7th november 2004 | Hamburg
Bitfilm Festival introduces new Demo Competition
Information: The category has been extended and now covers demos as well.
The Bitfilm Festival for digital film culture introduces a new award for 64K demos – 3D animations lasting several minutes that fit into a computer program of only 64 kilobyte. The film-festival, which takes place from November 3rd to 7th in the “Mandarin-Kasino” in Hamburg, is the first of its kind to include productions dubbed 64K Demos. The effects shown in such programs are calculated in realtime using only the processor and video card of a PC.
“64 kilobytes - this is smaller than an everyday Word document. The magic the programmers and designers of the Demoscene can create is truly impressive”, Bitfilm organizer Aaron Koenig says. “The computer animated movies that are competing in our other categories normally take up several hundred megabytes.”
Demos are not like classic computer generated movies where 24 or 25 frames (pictures) per second are pre-calculated and stored in a film-studio in order to be played back at a later time when the movie is shown. Demos are small programs consisting of instructions telling the computer how to generate the pictures, movements and sound.
These instructions, each of which is only few bytes long, take much less storage space than video sequences, where every single pixel needs to be stored.
However, the productions of the Demoscene do by no means fall short in terms of creativity and visual impressions compared to the classic 3D animated movie.
“As far back as in the early 80s have creative hackers been conducting visual experiments using their computers. This basically started in a computer stone age, at least if you consider the early creations on home computer machines like the Commodore C64.” explains Tobias Heim from Digitale Kultur e.V., an organization dedicated to raising attention for the many facets of digitally created productions of arts and culture. The organization supports the Bitfilm-Festival in their programming. “This early movement evolved into the vital thing named ‘Demoscene’, that meets in parties where the best demos compete in contests. It’s great that the Demoscene now has the chance to reach out to the larger audience of an established film festival.”
64K Demos and digital movies can be submitted until July 15th in six categories at http://www.bitfilm-festival.org/.
The total value of the prizes is 10,000 Euro.
For the fifth time Bitfilm-Festival will be presenting computer generated animated movies. Bitfilm was the creator Germany’s first contest for Flash Movies, Europes first festival for realtime movies generated by game engines (Machinima) and the first competition for Micromovies on cell phones.
Press information
The press information is available in pdf format.