Reading Kills

Can you imagine a world in which no one can read because if they do their death will be imminent? This is something the denizens of this particular world discover - and you can imagine the effects it has on their society...

It would certainly be a deterrent, perhaps even more so than in that most famous of dystopic illiterate societies featured in Farenheit 451.

Beto Gomez developed this idea for his thesis work at Vancouver Film School.  No one is safe, it seems – so you may well ask yourself why you are reading this!  Watch out! Behind you!

Dystopic Utopias: A Movie Montage

Clara Darko, a 33 year old Spanish film lover and video editor has outdone herself with this one – and I loved every second of it.  She has put together a montage of dystopic utopias but before proceeding on this project she laid down a few ground rules.  First of all, there had to be some sort of organized society, so purely post-apocalyptic films were dismissed.

Next, the oppressed had to be humans, not aliens or androids.  Society had to be controlled by humans, not aliens or artificial intelligence.  Finally, society must have evolved only through human ways, not biological.  With those rules in place you might wonder how many films that she had to choose from, but fear not there were plenty enough to make this visually enthralling movie montage.

If you want to know which each movie featured is (in order) then here you go.  The montage starts with Starship Troopers and proceeds to feature Minority Report, Death Race 2000, Running Man, Death Race, Gamer,  Surrogates, The Island, Zero Theorem, Snowpiercer, Wall•E, Idiocracy, Fahrenheit 451, The Purge, Total Recall, Repo Men, I, robot, Soylent Green, The Lorax,  Demolition Man, Elysium, The Giver, Serenity, Metropolis, Aeon Flux, Logan's Run, Divergent, A.I., Babylon A.D., Blade Runner, Cloud Atlas, THX 1138, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Sleeper, Escape from L.A., Dredd, Total Recall (2012), Freejack, The Hunger Games, Fortress, Gattaca, Code 46, Never let me go, In time, 1984, Brazil, Scanner darkly, Equilibrium, V for Vendetta, A clockwork Orange and Johnny Mnemonic – 51 movies all told.  Time, now, to get my breath back!

Greenfields

You think we might get tired of dystopic visions here, but not when they're like this.  A father and son dream of escape from a totalitarian city, knowing that the green fields of their so-called enemy are finally in reach for them.  Yet when escape arrives, is it all that they dream it will be? Greenfields is a graduation movie directed by Luis Betancourt, Benjamin Vedrenne, Joseph Coury, Michel Durin and Charly Nzekwu at Supinfocom.

Mountains

At some point in the future an individual manages to make contact with one in the past and he recounts to the incredulous listener how the world has changed out of all recognition, as well as those who inhabit it.

Combining 2 and 3D animation techniques with a marked graphic, pictorial style, Mountains is the work of Ronny Traufeller who created it as his degree thesis. Believe it or not he has been too shy to share this with the greater world – Mountains was completed in 2009. Well, we are very glad to have it among us now, Ronny!

H.U.D. Heads Up Display

So, what comes after Facebook? What does the world of social networking hold in store for us in the near future?  Perhaps unsurprisingly filmmakers are veering towards the dystopic (partly because if you make a movie where social networking has cured the world’s ills – full stop – then you don’t have a movie).   I wouldn’t mind a future where we all travel around on imaginary pink unicorns but I imagine it might get a little boring.

Yet the protagonist of Evan Jarvi’s HUD – Heads Up Display – has not found happiness, let alone pink unicorns.  In fact HudNet seems to have made his life about as bleak and meaningless as it could get.  He wakes up alone, travels alone, works alone – his only company is the all-pervasive presence of the automated iris recognition living nightmare that is the HudNet software.

Can he escape the awful monotony? With shades of Orwell and a dash of early Lynch, HUD will reward your patience with an answer, almost. Yet that still makes it a lot more satisfactory than a lot of science fiction shorts these days! Oh and I really, really liked the depiction of the futuristic biometric interface - very imaginable.

Plurality

Want to experience the ultimate social network? The Bentham Grid went online in 2023 and it ties every detail of your existence up and tracks you using your DNA.  New York City gives the grid the green light and crime plummets to all-time lows. A new era seems to be upon us – the perfect society.

Set in 2023 New York looks little changed – except for the technology involved – and it strikes the right note. It is something that the makes of Children of Men got right a few years ago, transplanting us to a near future without losing the cultural handles needed to make it seem real to us.  I was left wanting more – much more – at the end.  This could (and should) be developed in to a motion picture.

The movie is jam packed with excellent ideas and imagery, from the familiar but futuristic technology (I just hope the executives of Apple aren’t watching) to the weaponry – plenty of references to other movies too.
Yet one reference is to the past. The name of the Bentham Grid harkens back to one Jeremy Bentham, the English founder of modern utilitarianism and someone who designed but never built something called the Panopticon.

The basic concept of his design was to allow watchmen to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) people within a certain area without their being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.  An interesting idea, but the enterprise was to create a perfect prison and not a perfect society.

This is an excellent slice of science fiction by @radical.media who until this point has been best known for its commercial work.  However, Plurality looks set to change that.  They are hybridizing to develop, produce and distribute TV and movies among other forms of digital content and design.

The movie stars Jeff Nissani who you may have seen in last year’s comedy short Mac & Cheese.  The female lead is played by Samantha Strelitz who has recently been seen in The OC Club and I Married a Mobster.   If support actor John Di Domenico seems familiar then it’s probably because you have seen Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans although his résumé does also feature the more upmarket The Sopranos, in which he played Howie Reinstein in 2007.

Hats off to director and writer Dennis Liu, who is a graduate of the Taft School and NYU with a major in film, for this exemplary work.

Dystopia

Dystopia – a grey, bewildering and repressed place, ruled over by an unseen elite. Yet in to this dark place a little color somehow finds it way. It has an effect on one individual who begins to express himself using forbidden colors. This wonderful piece of animation is by Daniel Leyva, Esteban Fernández Dagach and Dieter Schindler at the Animation School of Hamburg.

Please note that this animation does contain a little grown up imagery, so if you are easily offended, best not to click play!

Nothing To Fear

This bleak but perfectly animated short film is a personal project by illustrator, motion graphics designer and art director Simon FA Russell.  It imagines a time in the near future where everything is seemingly controlled by technology except, perhaps, the imagination.  If this is all sounding a little Winston Smith to you then you will probably be right: what little plot there is certainly sounds like something from 1984.

What separates this, however, is the exquisite way in which it has been animated - solely in black and white.  Together with a beautiful composition by Ben Ash of Candle Music for its soundtrack and sound effects and the music of Ólafur Arnalds, the whole piece comes together seamlessly.  It is a thought provoking piece.  The length of time it will stay in your head is belied by its brevity, but I am sure it will.