BLUE COLLAR ART: An interview with F4 film festival founder/director J.C. Bouvier. By: Warren Curry 2/24/02   Part Two (of Three)

How many films will be screening at the festival?

We just set up our schedule and it looks like about 35 or 37 films will screen, the majority being shorts. There will still be features and documentary features, but it just turns out that we received a lot of shorts. We had a total of around 80 submissions.

How did the process go in selecting the films that were going to make the cut?

I took my core group of staff and we decided what we liked and what we didn't. Then we took that pile and handed it over to the Fitchburg St. communications department and they did the same. We matched up opinions, but I had final say, which was nice.

Do you have an estimate as to the number of people who will be attending?

Hopefully about 1000 people, but this being our first year it's difficult to discern. We've received a lot of good press and we're going to send out another press release on the 22nd. I have an interview with New England Film tomorrow for their website, we have a listing on the Massachusetts Film Office phone line, Imagine Magazine just did a big article on us, the Lowell Sun might do an article and we're trying to get the Boston Globe comedy critic out, because John Landis is coming. I'm hoping that in itself will cause a buzz. Whether or not we can draw from Boston remains to be seen, but a lot of filmmakers are telling me that they've spread the word to everyone they know, so there should be some people out here. I think a lot of interest is due to the prizes.

Tell us a bit about the prizes.

Through my contacts at Media 100, I was able to secure some prizes. I got about 10 copies of Media Cleaner 5, which is a compression/conversion utility for any sort of media file; Quicktime, Windows, Real, MPEG. You just throw a file in there and it crushes it into a smaller file for the Web or CD Rom. Then we have 10 copies of a program called Cinestream, which used to be called Edit DV and that's a software-based application for editing DV on Windows and Mac. Our grand prize is the Media 100 XS system, which is worth about $10,000 -- the software packages are worth about $600 each. It was just a matter of telling them that I was putting together the film festival, and Fitchburg was sort of the working man's film school. We are offering tools back to the filmmaker, which we thought was a good theme. We haven't really hammered that theme home, but we will at the event.

In the F4 mission statement, you state that the festival is geared toward filmmakers who come from a public education background. I assume this means state school vs. private school i.e. Fitchburg St. vs. Emerson College.

We weren't really positioning it that way, and I've been trying to get the Emerson people to talk to me about doing a panel. Certainly, it's about the working kids and the people who haven't necessarily had all the opportunities others may have had in a higher profile educational institution like Emerson or Boston University. I've always felt, having had friends who've come out of those programs, that they were a bit rubber stamped. It was the people who had a fire under their ass to get something out of their education that were really producing decent stuff and finding those spots in the industry that were somewhat coveted. Just looking at people who are going after what they want instead of being placed by some factory internship program.

You're accepting submissions on a variety of formats. Along those lines what are your feelings about digital video?

It's enabling technology -- the fact that you can buy an entire editing system and cut a feature on it for sub $5000 is huge. It will probably fill more of a Francis Ford Coppola vision where little Sally is going to go up to the computer and will cut her masterpiece at age 8, and I'd love to see something like that happen and I think it probably will at some point. I think it's a great thing -- it's like the desktop revolution. I think Apple is the biggest purveyor of that message and they're doing a hell of a job and spending a lot of money doing it. Steve Jobs said it best -- this is the first generation, since the advent of television and movies, who will actually be able to cut in the vernacular they've been educated by, which is film. The first generation that will be able to create something in what they've been socialized by. As much as he's a showman and a salesman, I think it's a great point that is absolutely true.

What do you feel about the present and future of the Internet as an outlet for filmmakers?

What I've been seeing is that IFILM and Atom Films are starting to charge filmmakers to put their stuff on-line, and I understand that with the dotcom blowup they need to drive their revenue model. I think as hard drive space becomes cheaper, it'll become easier to upload all this stuff and find a bigger audience. The big problem right now is the bandwidth. The pipes are bigger, but the players and encoders aren't providing the data as quickly as they need to. I think MPEG-4 is going to be a real boon for that entire thing and for digital asset management, where you have the MPAA looking for ways to control their copyright, yet spreading the stuff and charging for viewing. The standards for MPEG-4 are starting to address that in player and server format. Once you're able to take a look at a high bandwidth, low data size image cheaply, it's going to be huge. Also, the ability to deliver that to a cell phone or a PDA is also going to be huge. MPEG-4 is enabling all of this and it's just around the corner. The two most forward thinking companies in this way are Apple and Sony.

From looking at the F4 website, it appears that there are going to be several interesting forums. Any in particular you want to talk about?

The gaming one is big -- "Film vs. Arcade." Last year was the first year when video games surpassed film in gross revenue, and that's a big deal in my book. You're starting to see the branding of games in the film industry like Final Fantasy. They're using that process now as a huge boon for money. That's the other thing -- we're starting to transcend just the simple passivity of film going and beginning to actually become a truly interactive visual society, where you have people who are playing video games controlling the characters. It's moving from where you used to have film as the replacement for the oral storyteller and now you have video games as this handheld, totally programmable protagonist. Pretty soon you'll be saving these characters and trading them amongst friends. I think Dreamcast actually started on technology along those lines. It was shrewd idea, but not totally there yet, which is probably why Dreamcast failed.

Click for Part Three

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