The Sundance Film Festival is brimming with movies, but only a few will be screened on ice sculptures.
For that kind of supercool showcase, you’ll need to hit the Showwx Film Festival, which will present a slate of arty indie cinema screened using Microvision’s Showwx laser pico projectors. The pint-size gadgets give iPhones, laptops and other mobile devices the ability to project DVD-quality images up to 200 inches onto any surface — up to and including including a woman’s bare back.
The inaugural film fest, a collaboration between Microvision and San Francisco-based transmedia outfit cloudzero, will show a selection of feature films, shorts, documentaries and animation in three screening stations, including an ice sculpture, a ceiling and an area called “BYOMS,” short for “Bring Your Own Multiplex Screen.”
That’s where the clever geeks of cloudzero will show attendees how they can dream up their own DIY screens without sacrificing resolution.
The Showwx Film Festival, which runs Friday and Saturday at the Sidecar Bar in Park City, Utah, is offering a prize to whoever can come up with the most original “spontaneous screen,” to be decided by the audience.
Showwx pico projectors can help free indie filmmakers of distribution hassles, said Matt Nichols, Microvision’s director of communications, in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. “An artist can upload their work to share with audiences beyond the confines of brick-and-mortar theaters,” he said.
Due stateside in March for around $500, Microvision’s laser pico projectors are simple plug-and-play devices that can connect to most iPods and other mobile gadget with a TV/VGA outlet (see Showwx specs). In the future, the projectors will be embedded directly into handhelds, allowing users to project pristine images anywhere, at any time, Nichols said.
“No more squinting at small screens,” he said. “The projector requires absolutely no focus adjustment. The images are always in focus at any distance, even around curved surfaces.”
Showwx films scheduled so far include David Russo’s mad-scientist comedy The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Katie Turinski’s drag-queen documentary Sissyboy, Nara Denning’s Neurotique (photo at top), Floria Sigismondi’s rock biopic The Runaways and Matthew Mishory’s Delphinium .
“The Showwx Festival is a happening,” said Shade Rupe, director of acquisitions and transmedia curator for cloudzero. “We’re creating live events of a new kind with this new technology.”
Alexander Besher, cloudzero partner and co-founder, agreed. “First, we thought in terms of art happenings. But then in terms of a performance within a performance — with a film projected onto the back of a nude model as an art class sketched or painted her, with the audience watching the film on her naked body while they were also being included in a sketch by the artists.”
Which raises a cool question: What are some of the more clever projection possibilities? Cloudzero is going wild with ideas.
“How about political protesters laser-projecting Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington onto the white dome of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.?” Besher asked. “Or Greenpeace activists projecting one-second shorts onto the lifted underbellies of gray whales being hunted by Japanese whalers, as the entire slaughter is being filmed for later projection as a documentary? We just projected a short film onto the thick white blanket of snow that’s collecting on our balcony, and it looked so beautiful and pure in the night. After all, what are movies and films but dreams made real and tangible? And what else is technology but the dream of making the dream real?”
