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Super Gr8 film festival

Posted: Mon Nov 25, 2013 7:33 pm
by heyvern
My brother has been participating in the Super Gr8 film festival held in Harrisonburg VA. It just gets better and better with more elaborate entries and sets. It's also getting a lot of attention.

They just held the 2013 festival a few days ago. My brother won best "audio" or sound track (not for the quality of the audio but the content). He is a writer and musician and creates these interesting and funny stories. Almost the entire film uses stop motion animation this year.

What has really interested me are the animated entries. There are all kinds of techniques used, stop motion, claymation, traditional cell animation. My brother has used stop motion in most of his entries. Others have done pretty standard hand drawn "cell" animation and also free form stream of consciousness frame by frame drawing. One of the entries in the 2013 festival was a claymation recreation of the last 3 minutes of the movie "Die Hard". The audio is simply pulled directly from the actual movie, all the action was claymation.

Below are links to some of the entries over the years available online:

Life is Super Gr8 (Recent PBS Documentary)


Super Gr8’s Videos on Vimeo

Something Else - 2011 Animation - Winner of the 2011 Super Gr8 Film Festival: Best in Show Award


Workin' for the Yankee Dollar - Award Winner - Audience Award - Super Gr8 Film Festival 2010


This next link is my brother's 2013 "bootleg" on Youtube. The process of getting copies of the digitized films is horrendous and takes way too long. One of his early entries he didn't get a copy for nearly a year or more. This year my brother went to an encore showing, shot his film with a video camera, then he fixed the audio sync and posted on youtube.



The key to this is that the rules of the contest puts everyone at the same level. No matter your skills as an artist or film maker everyone has the same limitations.

Because of the rules of the festival, the audio is difficult to "sync". A film cartridge is provided to the participants. They shoot their film and edit "in camera" only. Not cutting, or post editing allowed. Any special effects of any kind is limited to the camera. Some of the cameras you can get on eBay or through online auctions are very expensive and have many cool in camera effects.

You shoot the film in sequence, return the undeveloped film along with an audio track on CD and only see your final film the same night as the audience. For example, my brother was very annoyed because he started filming "too early". The first few seconds of the film were shot on the leader, so his audio was off by 3 seconds. The festival organizers don't really make an effort to do any syncing when digitizing the film. It is sent to a professional company that specializes in digitizing super 8. Also there is "drift" of audio to frame rates. Even when getting a perfect sync at the start, by the end the timing has drifted due to some weirdness with the frame rate of super 8 and the digitizing process.

Re: Super Gr8 film festival

Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2013 6:21 am
by stephaniemason
I have heard a lot about this Super Gr8 film festival I wish I could also take part in it some day.