Tuesday, August 29, 2006

IFC Media Lab - kinda cool, kinda annoying

A former collegue of mine who works on testing and developing websites told me about the IFC Media Lab. People upload their super short films (less than 7 minutes), write a blurb about it, answer some questions and then watch as their fellow film snobs give out ratings on a 1-10 scale. The averaged score of even the highest rated films tops out at about 4.5. IFC claims the best films get aired on TV, "uncut".
There are three reasons for this low scoring trend:
1) Most of the films are extremely dissapointing. Maybe I'm a snob but most of these pieces are trying too hard and/or don't make any fucking sense. Most are poorly done and contrived. Maybe I'm not a snob (I didn't go the film school) and just don't know what "good" film is.
2) People who watch these pieces usually are the kinds of people who make films, want to make films, or just went to film school. So the average viewer tends to know when a video sucks. Even if they subconsciously think the piece is good, the viewer can avoid bruising their ego by giving out scores no higher than 5 out of 10. After all, they could have made a better film.
3) You can see how much someone spent on the film. $8000 for a 2 minute piece that sucked?!? God I wish I could burn money like that. I could heat my house burning money like that. And by "house" I mean "apartment that I share with two friends".

So while this post has had a negative slant to it, I was honestly very impressed by a few of the pieces I saw on the Media Lab. One animated/narrative/music video piece that I loved is called "Don't Fuck with Love". Seems about right. I also thought that the documentary "How to Bury a Dead Guy" was a great idea though poorly executed. I wish I could paste them into this posting but alas, IFC is far to good for that kind of sharing. You'll have to make do with the links.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

well, i guess since i'm at afi, that gives me some street cred to second that most (not all) of the films on the IFC site are pretty lame and masturbatory.

that being said i think the concept behind the site is cool, but the content needs some better narrative stuff going on. i mean, drama, not melodrama.

11:22 PM  

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