The Illudium Film Society

The Illudium Film Society was formed for just the love of film, particularly science fiction, and is a family effort. Bill's daughter, Ms. Austin Anderton is in charge of the Society's outreach, endeavoring to increase awareness of the Society's films to high-school and college students. One of the objectives of the Society is film education. The Anderton's noticed that the recent reboots of Sci-Fi programs such as Dr. Who are very popular among Austin's generation. These programs and films have very large and active fandoms, but few know of the long history of the films in this genre.

The Society consists of people willing to adopt one or more films for full curation and development of the film's full history. When ready, curators will present their films at the regular screenings of the Society as a whole. Curators are all volunteers and are (or become) experts in their films. The rest of the Society consists of people with an interest in the Society's films and their screenings.

The Illudium Film Society's Summer Sci-Fi Film Series will begin in Dallas during the Summer, 2015. The series will re-introduce some of the early notable Sci-Fi films to a new generation of young people with little prior exposure to the roots of the genre. The Society will host two theme-related and notable films per evening and feature a presentation by the films' curator/film historian discussing the films. Each monthly session of the film series will be publicly hosted and open to the members of the Society and the general public.

New Website and New Programming

The Illudium Film Society is setting up a new web site in June 2020 for the announcement of its Fall 2020 programming. See https://illudiumfilm.com for details. Prior to the COVID-19 lockdown we were planning on a Fall 2020 physical film festival. Now, we are uncertain. We may do a later physical festival or do a third online film festival.

Curation Services

In our first two online festivals, we did not merely present the films we showed, we invested deeply in re-mastering from uncompressed originals when possible on a frame-by-frame basis. When original source files were not available we used the highest quality intermediate master available.

When we present films online, Illudium Film Society arranges to get the source materials of each of the films for our use from their owners and/or copyright holders and perform the re-mastering of each film. Getting our hands on the open-source material is what allowed us to build new high-quality masters.

Also, when showing copyrighted materials, the Society secures the legal permissions to use the films and display them in its film festival.

The Society has also provided all of the curation services of the films during our re-mastering process. Curation ensures that every frame of the film is being displayed in the way that the films were shown in their original presentation and as intended by their directors.

Since our distribution file sets came from uncompressed originals (rather than the low-quality compression typically used for online viewing), these films will be displayed as close to their original quality as our users' devices and broadband connections will allow.

The Name

In case you are wondering, the term "illudium" comes from the classic 1948 Looney Tunes cartoon, "Haredevil Hare" directed by Chuck Jones and starring Bugs Bunny.

"Haredevil Hare" introduced the character Marvin the Martian, although he was unnamed at the time of the cartoon's release. On the Moon, Marvin was trying to use the "Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator" to blow up Earth because it blocked his view. Although the space modulator resembled a mere stick of dynamite (complete with fuse), the "PU" descriptor is the scientific notation for chemical element plutonium used in atomic weapons. It implied an atomic-scale Martian technology sufficient to obliterate Earth. Of course, Bugs steals the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator and Marvin's attempt fails. Marvin exclaims, "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"

The term "illudium" implies whimsy, a relationship with SciFi (one of the specialties of the Society) and an "earth shattering" implication. In an early promotion of the society, the tagline, "The Illudium Film Society: The Kaboom Is Here" was used to position the Society.

Illudium Film Society's First Online Film Festival

We conducted our first Online Film Festival on March 6-8, 2015. The festival was presented in cooperation with the Illudium Film Society. During the festival, our visitors viewed the films we presented and voted for the awards presented by the Governors of the Illudium Film Society.

The film festival was a great success. During the run of the two-and-a-half-day festival, we fielded almost seven-thousand requests to view the films being presented.

We are reprising the film festival just for the fun of doing it again and to provide some online entertainment for our students and visitors.

This is a totally online festival. We are presenting the festival's films via high-quality Adaptive Streaming Media Services. Details can be found via the buttons in the sidebar to the right. All you need to participate is a broadband connection and a web browser.

Our online film festival is FREE and open to anyone as a public service.

In the times of big-budget studio films, see what a bunch of folks can do with almost no budget, free software and lots of talent!

Illudium Film Society's Second Online Film Festival

We presented our second online film festival on July 18 - 24, 2016. We presented the documentary, "MoonScape" about the Apollo 11 moon landing and moonwalk that occurred on July 20, 1969. MoonScape was produced by a team led by Paolo Attivissimo, a British-Swiss-Italian science journalist, and longtime space enthusiast.

MoonScape is an open-source documentary produced and funded by space enthusiasts, featuring restored and remastered video, film footage and photographs presented in chronological order beginning with the moon landing and running through the entire extra-vehicular activity (EVA). The material is presented in its entirety. The runtime of the documentary is three hours and twenty-seven minutes (207 minutes.)

All of the source material has been restored, re-scanned and digitized from the best available sources. The live TV broadcast, the 16mm color film footage shot on the Moon and in Mission Control, and the Hasselblad 70mm color photographs taken by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, have been fully synchronized with the audio recordings (including the onboard and Mission Control recordings) and are presented in real-time, as they happened, with full subtitles in English.