Welcome

Our Online Film Festival ran from 2pm CST Friday, March 6 until 10pm CDT, Sunday, March 8. The official run of the festival is closed but the festival's mini-site and films will remain available for viewing. The films can be viewed at your convenience via the button in the sidebar on the right-hand side of the page. Also, please spend some time reading the background material on each film and watch the "The Making of" video feature on each film's background page.

Illudium Film Society's Online Film Festival

In cooperation with the Illudium Film Society, our first online film festival is open and currently screen films!

We are presenting the festival's films via high-quality streaming media services. 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.

All four films and all of the software used to make these films are free, open-source or very low cost. In addition, the four of the five films being presented as well as all of their work product are also open source and freely available. The films are free to display anywhere.

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!

We proudly present all five films in our first online film festival. To screen the films, click on the links below or use the buttons in the sidebar on the right-hand side of the page.

All films are available for screening on-demand. To access the films and their background information, please click the buttons in the sidebar on the right-hand side of this page.

Festival Awards

Sunday night after 9pm CDT when viewer voting closed, we awarded the Festival Governors Award and the Viewers Choice Award. The Festival Governors Award is granted by the Governors of the Illudium Film Society who are all film buffs, film historians or film curators. Votes from viewers cast during the run of the festival decided the Viewers Choice Award. The straight number of file views determined the Most Viewed Award.

Voting for the awards is now closed. The awards from our first Online Film Festival are as follows:

The Festival Governors Award – “Sintel”
Viewers Choice Award – “Big Buck Bunny”
Most Viewed Award - "From Little Acorns"

Please Sign Our Guest Book

During the run of the festival, we operated a Guest Book for visitors to sign. The Guest Book has now been deactivated.

Festival's Film Discussion Forum

During the run of the festival, we operated a live real-time Forum for visitors to discuss the films. The forum has now been deactivated.

The Film Being Presented

Four of our films are from the open source film movement and are short subjects from 10-15 minutes in duration. They are multiple award winners from other international film festivals. The four open source films we will be presenting are:

Elephants Dream (2005)
Big Buck Bunny (2008)
Sintel (2010)
Tears of Steel (2012)

The fifth film is "From Little Acorns" (2010), which has been carried on this website for the last three years as a reference test of our Adaptive Streaming capabilities. For the film festival, it has been re-mastered and re-encoded using our new media platform. It is shown here as a reference sample of the capabilities of our new platform.

Just Have Fun

We are presenting this film festival just for the fun of hosting it. We will be using the traffic from the festival to get operational data from the performance of our new media platform, but that is all behind the scenes. We simply want you to enjoy the films being presented.

We do our own professional media production for this website, and that means that we are filmmakers too. We love film as an art form and appreciate the creative work of others. We are delighted to present these films and will enjoy them as much as anyone.

Note from Ton

As a standard courtesy, I sent a note to Ton Roosendaal, Chairman Blender Foundation and Producer of the four Blender films we're showing, to apprise him of the use of his films in this film festival. I received the following note back from him:

Hi Bill,

Thanks for letting me know, it always makes me happy to read about people being able to use our free/open work. I hope our work inspires people to become creative with technology as well. So many stories to tell, so many discoveries to be made.

All the best,

-Ton-

Significance of the Films Being Presented

The four short films being present are significant because they are some of the best examples of the emerging open source film movement. There simply aren't that many purely open source films. The open source film movement is young, only about twelve years old. In that time, only a handful of films has been released. Of those films, the Blender Foundation has made four of them; the four being presented here.

Because these films fall under the Creative Commons license, we can show them online in this festival. We simply aren't able to show online any of the many commercial films because their copyright holders would never allow it. These online source films present one of the few opportunities to conduct an online film festival.

Please Consider Making a Donation to Blender

The Blender Foundation receives no fees for displaying their films. If you enjoyed them, please consider making a donation directly to the Blender Foundation. Blender is currently working on their next film that will be a full-length feature. Any donation, even a small one, will help them achieve their goal. If you are interested, click here for details.

IFS - First Online Film Festival