Oh Internet

Over the weekend I went to a bunch of things at the ResFest at the National Film Theatre. Most of the things I went to were collections of either stand-alone short films or music videos, focusing either on animation or some fuzzy “exciting new design” gubbins. I’ve got lots of things to complain about, but first, the good stuff:

• Evil - Interpol. I’ve seen this several times before, but it’s still great. I really love the song, which helps, but the video it great on its own. As we were walking out of the cinema I heard some girl saying “God, that muppet thing really freaked me out.” which made me smile.
• The Joker - Fatboy Slim. This might be the most saccharine video ever created. It was made by one of his fans for a competition, and shows the dangers of letting crazy cat ladies make your videos for you.
• The JCB Song - Nizlopi. I’m cheating here; the video actually wasn’t shown at the festival but it should have been. I saw it at a similar event in Edinburgh and I’ve just found it online. You need to go and watch it now. Seriously, I’ll wait. Go.
• The Shouty Track - Lemon Jelly. Annoying song. Great crazy video.
• Love Being - Designer’s Republic (Of Wipeout fame). This was pretty decent, and was a lot more coherent than most of the things being shown. I guess they’re more experienced than a lot of the designers involved at making things that people actually want to watch. (Click on the “Citizen Bird” link on the video page.)

So, the rest of the things shown basically either annoyed or bored me. I nodded off during a few of them. The depressing thing is how horribly incestuous the whole design world seems to be. Most of the videos shown fell into 2 categories:

• Repeating, evolving geometric patterns or primitive shapes. Most of them look like they’re attempting to copy the late 80s/early 90s demoscene, but with less success. Design apparently gets a lot better when there are no designers involved.
• The previously noted “brooding, looming threat” video. These all follow the rough formula of taking a small and innocent anthropomorphised object (e.g. lemur, toaster, random bug-eyed humanoid thingy) and gradually making it’s world darker and more ominous. Ideally the ending should be as bleak as you can make it. Vaguely humorous the first time you see an example of it. Really irritating after the 50th.

Also, the audiences at the showings were largely comprised of loud design students. Possibly the only people on earth more annoying than actual designers. I tried to ignore them, but the loud braying throughout about how they’d done some entirely generic concept with just so much more style, and about how hard their 3-day working weeks are, didn’t really do much to improve my impression of the films.

<KentBrockman>Is it really time to start licensing designers before they can practice? In the eyes of this reporter, the answer, sadly, is yes.</KentBrockman>

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Media Consumption, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.