Science-themed short film group on YouTube: Kino Evolution

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this quite intensively for the last couple of hours, and come up with a bit more of a plan of how this might work. I’ve set up a YouTube channel for Kino Evolution – it looks quite sparse at the moment, but with your help, I’m sure it’ll be a hive of activity very soon .

I think the best way to kick-off Kino Evolution is to throw out a challenge to all you filmmakers out there. Make a short film (fiction, documentary, animation, whatever) with the theme of ‘Evolution’. It’s a pretty broad theme, so you could, for example, make a romantic comedy about a biologist who falls in love with a young-earth creationist, or an animation demonstrating the evolution of the fruit fly… whatever you decide.

It has to be under 10 minutes by YouTube’s rules, and Kino Evolution reserves the right to not include a film if we think it is unscientific or off-topic. I know, I know, it’s sooooo unfair

All you have to do once you’ve made your film is to upload it to YouTube, then send the URL of the video to kinoevolution[at]gmail[dot]com, and we’ll include it on the playlist!

I’m going to give you all a deadline for this. Have your URLs submitted to the email addy above by June 30 2008.

Who knows, if this takes off, we could have a different theme every month! So do like the Kino kids all over the world do, and get filming!

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Since 2005, I’ve been involved with a world-wide short film movement called Kino. Kino was founded in Montreal by a group of friends who were tired of sitting around waiting for funding, and decided they would stop whining (at which filmmakers are very adept), get off their butts and just make some damn films.

Some of these Kino founders came to my hometown of Adelaide in 2005 to run a Kino Kabaret (a week-long workshop) at the Adelaide Film Festival. After a week of intense filmmaking with some wonderful people (we made and screened films every 48 hours for 8 days), KinoAdelaide was born. 3 years later, we have hosted annual Kabarets of our own, and conducted (more or less) monthly screenings during the year where local and international Kino filmmakers can show off their hard work to slightly drunk, rowdy and usually appreciative audiences.

It’s not all fun and games, of course, when filmmakers and their egos are involved. Oh, and the apathetic and self-serving nature of Adelaideans generally doesn’t help either. So I made my exit from running KinoAdelaide after 3 years, and the co-organisers I’ve worked with for the last little while have since hung up their hats too. KinoAdelaide continues, with some new organisers and new filmmakers, but I don’t have much to do with it.

But I still love the idea of Kino. And I love science.

So I’m proposing to start a science-themed Kino group on YouTube. It won’t be a traditional Kino group, in that it will not geographically located in any particular city, but the basic philosophy will remain the same. All you science communicators and filmmakers – instead of sitting around whining about how disorganised/underappreciated/underrepresented science communication is, get yourselves a camera and shoot something to show the rest of the world!

I haven’t yet worked out all the mechanics of this group. It would have to be moderated to some extent, because it would no doubt be bombarded by pro-Intelligent Design propaganda almost immediately. Perhaps there could be a pre-screening process by a group of people (hey science bloggers, I’m looking at you!). This isn’t exactly in line with Kino philosophy but hey, we’ll call it the evolutionary process in action. In fact, we’ll call the group Kino Evolution.

What do you think? I’d especially appreciate any feedback from those who would be interested in participating in this group.