Since its inception as a one-off screening of new digital work at a San Francisco gallery, RESFEST has consistently championed the hand-tooled, the DIY, the brave and the boundary-pushing. For our 10th anniversary, we’ve chosen 10 landmark films to represent the festival’s 10 years, illustrating the myriad ways RESFEST filmmakers have devised to reinvent their medium. These diverse approaches include twisted new applications of animation in Michael Overbeck’s Tongues and Taxis and Pic Pic André’s Le grand sommeil, radically new takes on documentary in Stefan Nadelman’s Terminal Bar and Bob Sabiston’s Snack and Drink, and fascinating explorations of painstaking artistic processes in Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film and David Ellis’ Letter to the President. The result is an utterly unique timeline of filmic innovation and advancement.

ELECTRONIC BEHAVIOR CONTROL SYSTEM:
EMERGENCY BROADCAST NETWORK (LIVE)
AUSTRIA | 1998 | 4:56
EMERGENCY BROADCAST NETWORK: JOSHUA L. PEARSON, GARDNER POST, RON O'DONNELL, GREG DEOCAMPO
PRODUCER: JACK DANGERS
TOOLS: SONY HI8, RADIUS AND RASTEROPS VIDEO DIGITIZERS, QUADRA 950S, MAX, QUICKTIME, AFTER EFFECTS, PREMIERE, MEDIA 100, ROLAND V5 VIDEO CANVAS
Performed and recorded live in Austria, Electronic Behavior Control System offers a demonstration of EBN’s pioneering audiovisual mashup techniques. Pulling images at will from the network news, black and white movies and exercise videos, and feeding them into a monstrous rhythmic techno track, EBN creates a veritable epileptic seizure of modern pop cultural referents.

FAST FILM
AUSTRIA | 2003 | 14:00
DIRECTOR: VIRGIL WIDRICH
TOOLS: PAPER, A STURDY PRINTER, TONER, AFTER EFFECTS, SCISSORS, POINTED FOLDING TOOL FOR CREATING SHARP CREASES, A SAW FOR CREATING ROUGH EDGES, A CANON EOS D30 DIGITAL STILL CAMERA, MAXTOR DISCS USING A FIREWIRE INTERFACE, AND KAMILL HAND CREAM, TO SOOTH THE 24 HANDS FOLDING 65,000 PAPER MODELS
Virgil Widrich returns to RESFEST with yet another outstanding filmmaking achievement created through painstaking effort. Widrich printed more than 65,000 images from 300 films, folded them into paper objects and then brough them to life in a complex homage to the action film that also magically traces the history of cinema.

JON BON JOVI'S POOL CLEANER
UK | 2001 | 5:30
DIRECTOR: GARTH JENNINGS
In a hilarious piece of lo-fi satire that predates the viral videos of YouTube by years, Hammer & Tongs’ Garth Jennings offers a short mock-rockumentary in which Jon Bon Jovi’s personal pool cleaner dissects his unique working relationship with the larger-than-life rock star.

LE GRAND SOMMEIL
BELGIUM | 2003 | 5:00
DIRECTOR/ANIMATOR/SCREENWRITER: PIC PIC ANDRÉ
DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRPAHY: FRANK DEFOUR, JAN VANDENBUSSCHE, NICOLAS GUICHETEAU
EDITOR: ANNE-LAURE GUÉGAN
SOUND: BERTRAND BOUDAD, PHILIPPE VAN LAER
MUSIC BERNARD PLOUVIER
PRODUCERS: VINCENT TRAVIER, PHILIPPE KAUFFMANN
PRODUCTION COMPANY: LA PARTI PRODUCTION
CO-PRODUCTION COMPANY: ENTROPIE FILMS
TOOLS: D1 NIKON, AFTER EFFECTS, PHOTOSHOP, FINAL CUT PRO, PRO TOOLS
Part of the zany Belgian animated series Panique au village, Le grand sommeil (“The Big Sleep”) depicts the Rip Van Winkle-inspired series of events that befalls an unlikely trio of friends named Indian, Cowboy and Horse.

LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT
US | 2003 | 5:00
DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: DAVID ELLIS
ILLUSTRATION: THE BARNSTORMERS
POST-PRODUCTION: ALEX LEBEDEV
MUSIC: LEMI GITA AND THE SLICES
TOOLS: NIKON D1 STILL CAMERA, NICON CAPTURE, AFTER EFFECTS, FINAL CUT PRO
Just days before 2003’s War on Iraq, a group of New York artists known as the Barnstormers created a visual letter to the President. Using time-lapse photography, the film begins with a little girl writing in large letters on the floor, “Dear Mr. President.” Over the following weeks, 17 artists expressed their feelings about the conflict with morphing, improvisational camouflage-colored paintings.

SNACK AND DRINK
US | 1999 | 3:45
DIRECTOR: BOB SABISTON
PRODUCER: TOMMY PALLOTTA
ANIMATORS: BOB SABISTON, JENNIFER DRUMMOND, CONSTANCE WOOD, MIKE LAYNE, SHANNON PEARSON, JOHN PAUL, KIMBERLEE HEWITT
CAST: RYAN POWER
TOOLS: SONY VX1000, SABISTON’S PROPRIETARY ROTOSCOPING SOFTWARE, MEDIA 100
In the second demonstration of animator Bob Sabiston’s pioneering rotoscoping software, he and fellow filmmaker Tommy Pallotta accompany Ryan, a six-foot-tall, 13-year-old autistic boy, to the local convenience store to purchase a “snack and drink.” Along the way, Ryan describes his fascination with a set of six animated kids’ cartoon tapes starring Fieval, the mouse character from An American Tail.

TERMINAL BAR
US | 2002 | 22:00
DIRECTOR: STEFAN NADELMAN
NARRATOR: TOM CLIFFORD
MUSIC: DICK ZVED, STEVE ROSSITER, LEMME RIDE
TOOLS: FLASH, FINAL CUT PRO
Welcome to the Terminal Bar, one of the toughest grittiest bars in Manhattan, where, over the course of 10 years, bartender Sheldon Nadelman took more than 2,500 photos of his customers. For the film, his son Stefan uses the haunting black-and-white portraits to introduce the old-timers, winos, junkies, drag queens and cooks who hang out there, revealing not just the bar’s history, but also a forgotten side of the neighborhood west of Times Square, before it got Disneyfied.

TONGUES AND TAXIS
US | 7:30 | 2000
DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/ANIMATOR: MICHAEL OVERBECK
CROWD NOISES: AARON ZISMAN, VIVEK CARRASCO, LINDSAY HASTINGS, JESSE SCHMAL, MICHAEL OVERBECK
SQUIRREL HUNTING MUSIC: ALAN LANGDON, AARON ZISMAN
OTHER MUSIC: MICHAEL OVERBECK
ADVISORS: AMY KRAVITZ, STEVE SUBOTNICK
TOOLS: FLASH, MAYA, DECK 2, PRO TOOLS, FINAL CUT PRO
Rage leads to uncomfortable body mutilation for the central character in Michael Overbeck’s surreal animation involving an unhappy man, his squirrel-kiling cat, a trip to the hospital and an errant, atomic tongue. Look for loving references to Godzilla movies, strangely realistic pefromances from the tongue and an eager-to-please kitty, and a generally twisted view of the frustrations of urban life.

WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE
DIRECTOR/EDITOR/SCREENWRITER/PRODUCER: DANIEL ASKILL
CO-PRODUCER: CHRISTOPHER SEETO
CINEMATOGRAPHER: DENSON BAKER
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: ANDREW VAN DER WESTHUYZEN
MUSIC: MICHAEL ASKILL
CAST: KASIA WERSTAK, DANIEL ASKILL, JORDAN ASKILL
TOOLS: SUPER 16MM
As a child, Daniel Askill pondered the notion of reality, and the qualities of space and time. He returned to these musings in his stunning short film, which he says is about “characters who are able to transcend the everyday notions of space and time.” Super slow motion photography and visual effects enable this transcendence as Askill makes the real surreal.

WOOD TECHNOLOGY IN THE DESIGN OF STRUCTURES
US | 1997 | 9:00
DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR/SCREENWRITER: ERIC HENRY
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: ERIC HENRY, WITH JIM COURSEY
SOUND DESIGNER/COMPOSER: ERIC HENRY, WITH KEEFE SAN AUGUSTIN, PAUL MANLEY, MIKE DONOVAN
CAST: ERIC HENRY, JANET WARD, CRISTIE DAGLEY
TOOLS: HI-8, PREMIERE, AFTER EFFECTS, PHOTOSHOP, TARGA 1000 PRO BOARD, SOUNDEDIT 16, SONY DAT WALKMAN/RECORDER, VEST MADE OF FLOWERS
This movie is about alienated desire; that is, one’s desire to possess a desire one lacks (i.e. “I wish I liked jazz”). The consequences of alienated desire play out in a universe where people want to eat wood.