Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008

Filmmakers

JD Beltran

JD Beltran is visiting faculty in the New Genres department, and also teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies. She holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Juris Doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. JD was a recipient of the 1999 San Francisco Art Council Award to Visual Artists and held a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine. Her work has been shown throughout the US, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts; The Alternative Museum, New York; and Southern Exposure and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Her short film, Politics and Definitions, premiered as part of the series "UnConvention 2008".

Burnie Burns

Michael "Burnie" Burns is an independent filmmaker living in Texas. His most notable contributions have been in machinima, although he has also worked with live action. In April 2003, Burnie, along with several of his friends, created the Internet machinima series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, filmed using the Xbox video games Halo and Halo 2. Red vs. Blue is a machinima comic science fiction video series that chronicles the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon (Blood Gulch).

Hugh Hancock

Hugh Hancock, founder of Strange Company, has worked on commercial animation production since 1999. He is credited with coining the term "machinima" (together with Anthony Bailey), to refer to filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies. In 2000, Hugh set up the Machinima.com website together with commercial film-maker and soundscape artist Gordon McDonald. In 2006, it produced its first feature-length machinima film, BloodSpell. After two years of pre-production, BloodSpell was released in fourteen episodes during the course of 2006. In October of 2007, it premiered as a full-length movie at the Machinima Europe festival.

Matt Hanson

Matt Hanson is a film futurist; a writer and filmmaker described as an "international film visionary" by Screen International magazine. One of his groundbreaking projects is A Swarm of Angels, an effort to fund, film, and distribute, a feature film using the Internet and all-digital technologies. A Swarm Of Angels embraces the Creative Commons notion of flexible copyright licencing, allowing people to freely download, share, and remix the original media made for the project.

Damian Kindler

Damian Kindler is an Australian-born Canadian writer and producer. He immigrated to Toronto, Canada, when he was very young. He is the Creator, Executive Producer and Co-Writer of the new Television series Sanctuary, a Guinness Award-winning show that had its start as the first ever broadcast quality, HD, dramatic web-series, designed, at that time, specifically for the Internet. Prior to Sanctuary, he was a Writer and Producer on the Stargate SG-1 and Stargate: Atlantis television series, joining the SG-1 team at the start of their Sixth season in 2002.

Ton Roosendaal

Ton Roosendaal is the head of the Dutch foundation "Blender" and chief developer of Blender, the free 3D graphic software. Elephant Dream is the first short film to have been created using the free software and the input of developers worldwide. The Blender Foundation's second open movie project is Big Buck Bunny, in which five artists and two developers were invited to Amsterdam for seven months to create a funny and furry 3D short movie with Blender. Ton Roosendaal is also co-founder of the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo, the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands and one of the leading animation houses in Europe.

Mark Shubin

IEEE member Mark Shubin engineers live broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. With more than 34 years of engineering TV and radio broadcasts, Mark has helped to define some of the technical standards that now govern such broadcasts and has overseen the transition through several generations of TV equipment. In 1971, he helped launch a successful pay-per-view movie service for hotels. The following year, he founded his own company, Electronic Solutions, and in 1973 he was hired to help Lincoln Center engineer its first televised series, which eventually became known as "Live From Lincoln Center."

Jonathan Slon

Jonathan Slon lives in New York City with his wife and three children. He studied film and earned an MFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. However, he started working in the film business way before that, when he was in high school. He made a lot of training films for the military, hiring actors but using real tanks and aircraft. He shot second camera and did sound recording, and was eventually hired to make documentary films in developing countries. He has worked on a few features, and a Discovery Channel program that brought him to Singapore. He now works on webcasts for sharing medical information and live musical events. His film, Keeping Up With Jones, is about a homeless man — Jones — who is approached by a filmmaker to make a movie.

Timo Vuorensola

Timo Vuorensola is a Finnish film director and actor. He directed the Star Wreck movies Star Wreck V: Lost Contact, and Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, created by Samuli Torssonen. Timo also plays Lieutenant Dwarf in the films. He is currently directing a full-length made-for-Internet film Iron Sky, which is being produced through www.wreckamovie.com, an online collaborative film community. At Wreck-a-Movie, everyone interested in chipping in with their ideas and creativity can read the tasks given to the community and take a shot (write an entry) at them.