The Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah kicked off this weekend and Eric is blogging live as he covers the best in the Short Film Program. Check back throughout the holiday weekend for reviews, links, and some of the actual shorts themselves posted right here! This blog is also a part of the live coverage over at DigitalContentProducer.com, where Eric works as an associate editor. Head on over there for a podcast interview with Choke (based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk) director Clark Gregg.
This year, 45 of the 83 short films in the 2008 Sundance Film Festival are available at for viewing and/or download at iTunes, Netflix, and Xbox.com.
“Four score and seven years ago, to thine own self be true. I believe in rock n’ roll. I believe in getting high.”
- Cowman Kennedy’s infamous Gettysburg address
The Kansas City, Mo. art collective known as MK12 has been on quite a roll lately. The ingenious graphics that highlighted Will Ferrell’s routine life in Stranger Than Fiction were theirs, and Director Marc Forster utilized their animation talents again for the opening credits of his newest film, The Kite Runner. This year, Sundance spotlights their subversively fun short The History of America, which was one of 16 works chosen by New York magazine as the best online content of 2007.
A visually dynamic mix of rotoscoped live action shot against a greenscreen and the latest computer animation techniques, The History of America is not the typical sly condemnation of U.S. culture that its title might suggest, but more a hilarious celebration of distinctly American iconography. Were it not for the epic war between the cowboys (who reside in Las Vegas and work from the Cowboy Headquarters and Casino) the astronauts (who live in a space station on the moon), the U.S. may not be the great country that it is today.
This ambitious project has been about four years in the making. Before any animation processing was done, MK12 storyboarded. Then, they finished a live-action rough cut, complete with actors and set design, to see what they had. Even when the computer processing had begun, every part of the film was still hand-tweaked in some fashion. A startlingly orginal creation, it combines cutting edge slick graphic design with a worn-out third-generation print look.
Dialogue is secondary (and even pretty hard to make out sometimes, like the actors are at the other end of the room and slathered in reverb) to the multilayered visuals and bombastic Western-style symphonic score. At 30 minutes, it runs a little long (especially for a short film), but The History of America is overflowing with new ideas.
Watch The History of America in its entirety below:
