The line between films and video games is actually becoming thinner all the time…

On the gaming side, actors are hired and their expressions are captured via Motion Capture, making possible to generate any desired sort of acting. The results are still not completely believable emotions but the engineers and designers, who based their work on the work of Dr Paul Ekman, seem to say that scanning a limited number of facial expressions should allow them to recreate the 3000 expressions Ekman has identified.

On the film side, a few experiments have been conducted, like this horror short film in Germany, where the actor in the film would call somebody in the audience to ask for instructions on which way to go. For Martin Scorcese, directors will in the future become orchestra conductors, bringing films an audience with several scenarios, the audience deciding what comes next.

All this sounds quite promising, and disturbing as well for us filmmakers. Is it good or bad for films as we know them?  In any case, a little revolution happened this week, with few people noticing: for the first time, a video game has been selected to a film festival! That’s the case of Beyond, who has been selected to the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival , an important NY independant festival. Beyond casted Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe and will be released in October 2013 on Playstation 3.

My mate Antoine Meu sends me a lot of videos. They are usually wonderful. I don’t know how he does it…scrolling through blogs, he’s always in the lead on everything.

Since often I’m very busy, I don’t always look at them. This time, he made sure I did. So I watched it. Its beauty is hallucinogenic. What I especially love is the collaboration between great musicians (the Tanuki Project) and great animators (Heliofant). It’s hard to say at this point if this is a short feature or a video clip. Whatever it is, enjoy it!

In the same genre, this little animation is an absolute gem. I have the same question here…what comes first, sound or image?

I’ve had the pleasure to meet the filmmakers from Coldsun, a small production company based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I found their work absolutely stunning. What do you think?