Workshop on ‘The Future of Celluloid’, November 10-18, 2008
As part of The Media Lab’s continuous effort to bring together practitioners from various fields in a vibrant platform of creative exchange, a workshop was planned on ‘The future of celluloid’, the theme that was chosen for the first international conference organized by the Lab. While the conference focused more on the theoretical issues around the theme, the workshop was supposed to acquaint the participants with practices that could be taken as truly signposting possible futures of celluloid. It was decided right at the outset that the workshop wouldn’t engage in developing particular skills of the participants but would gather a small team to share skills, visual ideas, sounds and stories to create a short video using contemporary ideas and a global perspective.
Matt Hanson, author, film director and producer from UK, was invited by the Lab to conduct the workshop. Hanson is the creator of a series of projects which investigate cinema’s possible futures, namely ‘A Swarm of Angels’, ‘onedotzero’, and book projects including The End of Celluloid. As creator of A Swarm of Angels, he has been concerned with issues relating to Creative Commons, Free Culture, Open source culture, Crowdsourcing and File sharing. A known ‘Film Futurist’, as he loves to call himself, and an well-acclaimed expert in digital media and moving image trends, Hanson has made a number of successful and innovative short films (including the award-winning Salaryman 6 and City of Hollow Mountains) and a television series for Channel 4 (UK). Screen International has already labeled him an “International film visionary”. Forbes listed him among the ‘Ten People Who Could Change the World’ in 2007. According to Hanson, the aim of the workshop was to engage the participants with the creative and technical aspects of filmmaking in the digital age and to fuse European and Indian sensibilities in film for the new frontiers of online video being enabled by the Internet and digital technologies.
The participants came from various fields: painting, installation art, digital media practices, video filmmaking, creative writing and acting. Out of a total of 15 participants, 5 were existing students and 2 were ex-students of the Department of Film Studies. Participants ranged from undergraduate students to established filmmakers and art practitioners.
The 9-day workshop started with a series of lecture-demonstrations by Matt Hanson trying to acquaint the participants with practices concerning the future of celluloid. It was followed by exhibition of works by the workshop coordinator and by the participants. What was truly exciting for the participants was the whole process of reflecting and commenting on this set of works. The films that came up in the discussions as crucial points of references were Chris Marker’s La Jetee, Sans Soleil, Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville, Mamoru Oshii’s Avalon, Ryutaro Nakamura’s Serial Experiments Lain, Peter Greenaway’s short films and contemporary works of Bill Viola and Janet Cardiff. The participants, guided by their supervisor’s vision of crowdsourcing and alternative video form in projects like ‘The Swarm of Angels’, jointly planned to make a short video . The last 4 days of the workshop were devoted to the production of the film. All the creative and logistic works including scripting, visualizing, camerawork, editing, sound, graphics and production management were fully shared by groups of participants with an overall coordination by the supervisor. No external input was used for the completion of the film. The film was screened in presence of the university community and the wider public at a pre-announced and widely publicized closing ceremony on the 18th of November at the Vivekananda Hall of the university. Following a discussion on the film, certificates were distributed among the participants by Prof. Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay, Professor at the Department of Film Studies. The workshop was coordinated by Abhijit Roy, Joint Coordinator, The Media Lab, and Reader, Department of Film Studies.