Brooklyn Film Festival (BFF) is proud to announce its 2013 annual festival themed Magnetic, as well as its partnership with TBWAChiatDay New York and WiMO Reality to produce Expand Your View, a mobile app campaign that drives awareness of the festival and ticket sales through innovative and artistic film code visuals. BFF has received over 2,000 films from 119 countries. 60% of all submissions are U.S. productions. The competitive event will run from May 31 through June 9 in Williamsburg at indieScreen (289 Kent Avenue) and for the first time at Windmill Studios NYC (287 Kent Avenue). The festival will present over 100 film premieres and each film will be shown twice. The full festival lineup will be announced in May 2013.
Expand Your View is a piece of work combining technology, print and video. Last year’s award-winning films from BFF have been compressed to form a ‘film code’ visual, made up of thousands of frames from that very film. On scanning the image with a smartphone, the image effectively expands to play the full trailer for that unique film, before landing on the Brooklyn Film Festival website. Partnering with others for the project, TBWA worked with IT student, Melvyn Laily, and software developed by him in C# for the .NET Framework, enable the film frames to be compressed into a unique film code. WiMO, a technology company that specializes in machine vision and augmented reality, has the software to recognize the picture when the user scans it (with the WiMO app). The app then sends the user to the video of the film’s trailer and then to the Brooklyn Film Festival website.
“This has been a collaboration of creativity, technology and great efforts from all parties involved,” said the creative team at TBWAChiatDay New York. “We tried to encourage film lovers and the community to see films through a different lens, the way the Festival itself is meant to. The interactivity of the campaign drives engagement with the Festival, its winners from last year and an understanding of what it is about, in an intriguing and relevant way.”
BFF’s prestigious alumni in recent years have gone on to garner both critical acclaim and nationwide distribution, such as Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky’s Battle for Brooklyn (shortlisted for a 2011 Academy Award nomination), Katie Dellamaggiore’s Brooklyn Castle (selected by P.O.V. for a nationwide PBS broadcast in 2013), Kelly Anderson’s My Brooklyn (one of the most successful DIY releases of 2013 so far), Lawrence Michael Levine’s Gabi On The Roof in July, Daryl Wein’s Breaking Upwards and Arin Crumley & Susan Buice’s Four Eyed Monsters. Numerous films from the Brooklyn Film Festival have gone on to be nominated for and win awards by both the American and British Academy Awards.
BFF Executive Director Marco Ursino said of the 2013 edition, “Magnetic is our study on all those invisible forces that bring people together or push them apart. It is our invitation to analyze and scrutinize the elements that surround us and to read between the lines while questioning the motives behind them. With Magnetic, we intend to create a field where filmmakers from different parts of the world attract each other into collaborations and partnerships. Magnetic will be a multi-layered competition between the positive and the negative, where the real prize will be a Brooklyn breakthrough.”
The Festival will continue its BFF Exchange project, inaugurated at the 2012 “Decoy” edition of festival, aimed ultimately at connecting filmmakers with film distributors. BFF Exchange will be staged at indieScreen on June 8, and will feature a pitch session and a “distribution” panel on each side of a working luncheon.
Also on June 8, as an immediate follow up to BFF Exchange, th
