Straight8
I went over to the Raindance Film Festival hoping to use my hard-won festival pass to get into NightWatch, which is supposed to be an exuberently over-the-top Russian fantasy thriller. Alas, it was sold out, perhaps because it's been labeled the must-see film of the year by Quentin Tarantino. (By which I mean that Quentin Tarantino has decreed it a must-see film, not that it is a film that must be seen by Quentin Tarantino.)
Instead, I watched the best films of Straight8, an annual filmmaking competition in which filmmakers are given a blank cartridge of Super8 film and challenged to shoot a short movie with it. The catch is that you have to hand in your film cartridge undeveloped, which means (1) you can't do any post-production on your film, and any edits have to be done "in-camera" by turning the camera off, pointing it at the next shot, and turning it back on; and (2) you don't get to see your finished film until it's projected onscreen at to a full theater.
In its adrenaline-fueled let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may spirit, the event reminds me of the 48 Hour Film Challenge, although in other respects it's completely opposite. The 48 Hour Film Challenge requires your film to be more-or-less improvised on the spot, but the Straight8 festival, by demanding that you edit your entire film on camera, requires a great deal of advance planning.
In any case, the results were interesting. Some were only successful in context. Others-- in particular, a quirky short about a guy who grows colour televisions in his garden-- would be charming and funny even if you didn't know the restrictions under which they were made.
I hadn't heard of the event before today, but now I'm highly tempted to enter it next time around.
Me and a couple of friends thought we were the first to invent a new form of film making which we called COLD HAZE. It turns out to be a hybrid of the "48 hour" and "Straight8".
We set out our rules as entirely in camera editing, with no redo's of takes, and all musical/sound performances being live. We were working on MiniDV though, and we set a time limit of 3 hours from conception to viewing, as we only had a 3 hour break before we started shooting the night scene that day (so to speak).
Ours turned out pretty well, although obviously with no planning the quality does suffer quite a bit. We made a comedy/action called "The Quest for the Tesco Value Blood Wine" and then a a suspense/horror, which turned into a comedy.
I'm not sure if we'll be screening them at festivals though.