Break-through of digital movies in the Netherlands

At last the Dutch Film Festival is reading the signs of the time and starting the Dutch Online Film Festival (NOFF). All film producers of Dutch movies can participate in this virtual festival. During this festival movies will be shown in the categories of drama, documentary movies, experimental, animation and interactive. Movies can be entered now via the Dutch Film Festival.

The movies will be shown on internet. From July 1st, 2006 the first movies will be shown. New movies will be added every week. From September 1st, 2006, the whole program will be online. During the 10 days of the regular festival the internet audience can vote for the NOFF audience award. A professional jury makes its own selection and awards the NOFF Jury Award. Both Awards will be presented on October 5th, 2006. Both Award winners will receive 2.500 euro.

The Dutch Film Festival organisation collaborates for the NOFF with DutchView, POOL, Public Broadcast and Tiscali.

This initiative is good news. Eleven years after having used internet as a promotion site first, the Dutch Film Festival starts now using internet as a distribution channel.

As if it was planned, the NOFF can expect the entry of Elephants’ Dream, a computer animation film of eleven minutes. Tonight this movie will first be shown in the Cinema Ketelhuis in Amsterdam, where they have digital projection.













Elephants Dream is a story with quick-witted dialogue, tightly designed architecture and unusual sound effects. The main characters, Emo (a cool young trumpeter) and Proog (a confused – or maybe not? – loner) are each stuck in a world of their own. At a certain moment they cross paths with one another. The oddball Proog cautiously tries to introduce his young friend Emo to his world. When Emo realizes that Proog primarily wants to push his ideas on him, this leads to a conflict between them. But can Emo survive in Proog’s world? And can they overcome their conflicts, or will they each go their own way in life?

The Orange Open Movie Project Team worked for seven months under the roof of the Netherlands Media Art Institute to develop the story, the animations and the production of Elephants Dream. The movie has been made with the Open Source software program Blender. Open Source software can be downloaded and used for free, and is completely open for anyone to improve and distribute again.

Along with the film, a DVD with the ‘making of’ will appear, on which the whole production of the film can be viewed, and Elephants Dream will shortly be found on the internet in a downloadable version.

Tags: digital movies