September 2002

Community Media Conference

September 9–15, 2002

For many filmmakers a medium where sound doesn’t synch well, cuts and dissolves are lost on a small screen, and viewers have to wait and wait for the film to download is a medum in which the limitations outweigh the benefits. But for media-makers who are experimenting and taking advantage of the ever-changing technology, web art is at the beginning of its evolution into a full-blown art form. These artists are finding that the web, like jazz, fosters an art form where the limitations are the liberating factor.

While dignitaries from fifty-three African countries gathered in Durban, South Africa, for the in Inaugural Summit of the African Union (AU), the African Union Film Festival (AUFF) drew together filmmakers, cultural policy experts and audiences for six days of free screenings and panels. The thirty-plus films programmed reflected African cinema’s past, present, and future, including classics, documentaries, shorts, and new feature films. Taking a cue from the new era launched by the creation of the AU, panels focused on the future of media in Africa.

The world of 3D animation is slowly opening up to new artists. New training options, online communities of users, and lower prices now make the prospect of 3D animation more enticing for independent filmmakers. But for those who know little about the field, starting out in 3D animation is still laden with many tough decisions, primary among which is selecting the animation program to invest in.

While the Lumiere brothers originally screened their films in a Paris café, the term microcinema was not coined until 1991 with the naming of Rebecca Barten and David Sherman’s Total Mobile Home Microcinema. Since then microcinema has come to define a broad range of small screening spaces specializing in moving image media that hovers out of range of national distributors, air conditioned art houses, and sleek museums. The hermit crabs of screening series, microcinemas claim abandoned spaces, creating surprising, inspiring, and unlikely homes for media.