Festival's Mission and Dedicatees
Kinodrome: an International Motion Picture & Screenwriting Festival is fully non-corporate, volunteer/donor supported non-profit and educational event. The festival presents the most original independently produced and student produced short form FILM/VIDEO/TV content from our state of Ohio and from around the world. In addition to motion media, the festival also presents: short, feature-length, and series-pilot SCREENPLAY content. We are interested in any genre or style, so long as it includes at least one of the following forms of creativity:
-- very ORIGINAL concept,
-- thought PROVOKING themes,
-- UNUSUAL subjects or characters,
-- an OPENMINDED way of artistic expression.
The judges want to see (or read) something fresh, or strange, or scary, or provocative, or shocking, or weird, or hilarious, or maybe politically “incorrect” and nonconformist. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “Nonconformist” as: “a person who does not conform to a generally accepted pattern of thought or action”. Be slightly DIFFERENT. We would like to see something original and NON-MAINSTREAM. We want our audiences to be taken on a ride, and to be affected by your unique content! Kinodrome doesn’t care how much MONEY you spent on your film or video (your budget size). We don’t care if you shot it on old film stock, or with an old camera, or on your mobile phone, or an expensive high-end 4k camera. Yes, you should pay attention to some basic filmmaking techniques and rules, decent cinematography, sound quality, and overall production value, BUT, what we really care about is - the content with:
-- NARRATIVE or VISUAL ORIGINALITY (offer something fresh, something unique and different);
-- ARTISTIC INNOVATION (explore "mise-en-scene" and "play" on your "canvas");
-- SOCIO-CULTURAL FIELD (real-life subjects, and thought-provoking social, cultural, or political problems);
-- an ARTHOUSE approach to cinema (breaking the "Hollywood rules" is fine);
-- the NONCONFORMIST way of expression!
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Our festival is less about “mainstream popcorn” content, and more about "indie arthouse" content. It’s all about your MESSAGE and your audience’s RESPONSE to it. The same approach applies to screenplays – write something slightly different and fresh. Don't be afraid to fully express yourself.
Inspired by Works of:
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• Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-1904, an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. His famous art-piece (and first motion picture ever made) “The Horse in Motion” (1878) – serves as our festival’s logo. Muybridge's early photographic experiments laid the foundation for modern cinema. Developing his keen interest in photography whilst recuperating from a stage coach crash in 1860, Muybridge moved to America upon his recovery, joining a San Franciscan photo business. Quickly establishing a reputation for landscape work, he was appointed director of photographic surveys for the U.S. Government in 1868, conducting studies of numerous remote areas, including the newly purchased Alaska. A capable and successful commercial photographer, Eadweard began to consider rapid motion photography in 1872 when approached by Californian racehorse owner, Leland Stanford. Stanford had reputedly laid a wager on the contentious issue of whether a galloping horse was ever airborne. Using wet plates Eadweard produced faint, highly underexposed plates, proving Stanford's assertion that all four hooves did, in fact, leave the ground at the same time. With the support of Stanford he expanded his experiments into horse movement, setting up a series of still cameras parallel to the race track. By connecting their electrically controlled shutters to trip wires lain across the track, he ensured each one automatically took its own picture as the horse sped by. The work was widely respected, being published in scientific journals and formally released in the study, “The Horse in Motion” (1882).
Inventing the zoopraxiscope, Eadweard found a way to project his silhouettes in rapid succession onto a screen. First demonstrated to the public in 1882, it is often quoted as the first ever moving picture. Years later, his pioneering work was cited as a major inspiration in the invention of the modern cine-camera by Thomas Edison. Having sparked considerable scientific interest, Eadweard took his work to the University of Pennsilyvania. Developing a new multi-lens camera, he produced a celebrated high-speed study into the movement of both animals and humans, published in eleven volumes as Animal Locomotion: An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movement (1887). Returning to England in 1900, he died at his cousin's house in 1904, and the building now hosts a British Film Institute (BFI) commemorative plaque, recognizing the contribution he made to the film industry.(info courtesy of Wild Film History).
• George K. Spoor, 1872-1953, an American film producer known for his early and successful movie exhibition service, ultimately named Kinodrome, in Chicago in 1897 – inspired our festival’s name. Primarily servicing vaudeville accounts throughout the Midwest and down the Mississippi Valley, Spoor was energetically in competition with 'Colonel' William Selig and his Polyscope service, but instead of making his own films he relied on supplies of pictures from others; before 1900 Edward Amet and later a variety of sources including Georges Méliès. He opened his distribution service, the National Film Renting Bureau, in 1904, and the increased demands of the nickelodeon era finally pushed him into film production in early 1907, when he founded the Essanay Company with Gilbert Maxwell 'Broncho Billy' Anderson, an important firm that made popular westerns (starring Anderson), launched the careers of J. Walter Kerrigan and Francis X. Bushman, and briefly employed Charles Chaplin. Essanay ceased production in 1918, and during the 1920s Spoor spent much of his time developing the Natural Vision system for widescreen 3-D films, producing the feature Danger Lights in that process in 1930. In 1947 he was one of a small group of American pioneers (Thomas Armat, William Selig, Albert Smith) given a special Academy Award for their contributions to the development of motion pictures.
(info courtesy of Victorian Cinema)