The Design Film Festival: Open Call for Films (+ Work-in-Progress Material)

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Price: free

In partnership with:
The Design Museum
Institut Français du Royaume-Uni

September - November 2020

DESIGNERS, FILMMAKERS AND ARTISTS - PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR WORKS
Deadline for Submissions: 10 July 2020

The Design Film Festival showcases films by designers, and films on design by filmmakers
and artists. It features moving images that are conceived as designs: through concepts such
as ideation, iteration and prototyping, or through modes of display and presentation. Equally,
the festival highlights films with narratives about design, in showing production methods,
distribution networks and consumption.

At a time of unprecedented restrictions on travel and the near-exclusive reliance on
digital networks, the festival presents new forms of engagement through the moving
image. These films carry progressive and alternative information and communicate ideas
through a universal and innovative language.

Designers, filmmakers and artists are invited to submit work from the last three years,
either individually, or collectively. The work should be submitted together with
prototypes, edits, remixes, samples, mood- and storyboards in order to show the
working process.

GUIDANCE NOTES FOR SUBMISSIONS

Film / Video Work
Please email your films through a vimeo-link to: j.scholze@kingston.ac.uk
Please limit your submission to one piece of work. We ask that the work is not older than
three years (completed between 2017 and 2020). There are no fees associated with your submission.

Work-In-Progress Material
It is not a condition for your film submissions to include work-in-progress, but we want to
encourage you to also submit a maximum of five relevant images that document the
research and development process for your submission. These images can originate from a
storyboard or script, they can show prototypes or sketches, representations of models,
display mechanisms or materials, location shots or screen tests.

Please include short descriptive captions for each of the images and upload them as jpgs
with your submission-email to: j.scholze@kingston.ac.uk The size for each image should not
exceed 1 MB.

We appreciate you may prefer to share high-resolution images of your work-in-progress but

in view of the volume of initial submissions, we need to impose the above size-limit. You will
be able to present high-resolution images of your work if shortlisted.

All submissions will be viewed by a selection committee, to include the three initiators of the
festival. The final selection of films for the festival will be decided by an international jury.
The Design Film Festival uses the online exhibition format to present a visual hypertext that
links complete work on the screen to related work-in-progress, demonstrating research and
development by allowing viewers to navigate references, storyboards, studies, sketches and
prototypes. Such ‘notes' are presented as creatively and conceptually equal to the principal
‘narratives', showing how process demands parity with results.

By sharing not only completed works, but also works-in-progress with a global audience, this
exhibition presents initial attempts, discarded ideas and prototypes. It highlights research and
development to understand design as a distinctively procedural and collaborative field of
creative labour.

The festival aims to show how new tendencies in design, filmmaking, visual communication,
as well as education, are shaping our perception of the moving image.
The online festival consists of a platform that is jointly hosted by the Design Museum and the
Institut Français starting in September 2020. It is intended for creative practitioners across art
and design practice, who are interested in storytelling, conceptual thinking, visual and
material studies. It is also expected to attract a general audience engaged in a critical
understanding of current geopolitical, social, ecological and cultural conditions through the
power of moving images

The Design Film Festival is part of a collaborative programme between HEAD-Genève,
Parsons The New School and Kingston School of Art, led by Alexandra Midal, Ulrich
Lehmann and Jana Scholze. Under the title, Montage: Design and Film, Film and Design,
students from three graduate programmes investigate the relationship between design and
film - film as medium of worldmaking, film as response to and reflection of current
environments and conditions, film as material for research and development and film as a
conceptual and practical tool for designing.

The Design Film Festival is curated by the MA Curating Contemporary Design, Kingston
University in partnership with the Design Museum.

The Design Film Festival is linked to the Invisible Film Festival, a contemporary platform
celebrating experimental films by designers. Founded by Alexandra Midal in 2017, the
festival addresses the expansion of the field of design; its inter- and transdisciplinary nature
and redefinition as geopolitical and social practice.

For further information about this event:

Contact: Jana Scholze
Email: J.Scholze@kingston.ac.uk