Seattle, WA - April 23, 1999 - AtomFilms (www.atomfilms.com) and D.FILM (www.dfilm.com) are joining forces to make film history, by pairing Star Wars fans with digital filmmakers to produce a movie for Internet distribution. Announced today, "Makin' Wookiee!" marks the first time that fans everywhere have had the opportunity to write and appear in a film. The groundbreaking interactive event is opening the filmmaking process to audiences worldwide.
AtomFilms and D.FILM are now accepting fan-written scripts for Star Wars parodies at their respective Web sites. A panel of judges headlined by Billy Dee Williams, who played Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, will "greenlight" one script submitted before the May 7 deadline. The winning entry will be produced into a short digital spoof by a team of established digital filmmakers, and the movie will premiere at AtomFilms and D.FILM on June 4. The contest winner earns not only a screenwriting credit and a piece of digital filmmaking history, but a cameo appearance in the film as well.
"Makin' Wookiee is a great way to open up filmmaking to mass audiences," said AtomFilms CEO Mika Salmi. "Thanks to digital filmmaking technologies, productions can now be completed quickly and at a low cost, and because of the power of the Internet, we can bring films to viewers everywhere without expensive production, marketing, and distribution costs."
The filmmakers standing by to create the film have years of experience with both digital films and Star Wars. Jason Wishnow is the maker of the acclaimed Star Wars fan documentary Tatooine or Bust, and the creator of The New Venue, a leading digital filmmaking showcase (www.newvenue.com). Evan Mather is the maker of several popular Star Wars-themed digital spoofs, including Kung-Fu Kenobi's Big Adventure, and proprietor of Evan's Star Wars Cinema (www.jedinet.com/cinema). Films by Wishnow and Mather are now screening at AtomFilms.com in conjunction with the Makin' Wookiee event; also available are the popular Star Wars spoofs Park Wars and Hardware Wars.
According to Wishnow, "We're going to empower a writer, somewhere in the world, who doesn't have filmmaking resources at his or her disposal. This is the future of cinema -- Star Wars is the catalyst."
Along with Billy Dee Williams, the panel of Makin' Wookiee judges also features industry notables such as Warren Franklin, former head of Industrial Light & Magic, Empire Strikes Back optical photography supervisor Bruce Nicholson, Hardware Wars producer Michael Wiese, Johan Liedgren and Noah Tannen of Honkworm International, D.FILM executive producer Bart Cheever, AtomFilms CEO Mika Salmi, and filmmakers Wishnow and Mather.
The D.FILM Digital Film Festival is a traveling and online showcase of films made with computers and new technology. The goal of the festival is to entertain, by showing audiences the very best work done by today's new breed of digital filmmakers, and to inspire, by actively teaching them how they can do it themselves. To this end, D.FILM is at the center of the grassroots digital revolution. D.FILM is the official Digital Film Showcase of the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, presenting its lineup via digital satellite transmission, making it the first truly digital film festival in terms of content and presentation.
The New Venue is the first online showcase for movies made specifically for viewing over the Internet. Created by Jason Wishnow and D.FILM to advance the aesthetic of web movies, the New Venue is both a curated exhibit space and a filmmaker resource, proving that the "generative constraints" of bandwidth can yield to intense creativity. D.FILM offers this distinctly online film festival as a complement to its traveling, "real world" digital film festival.
About AtomFilms
AtomFilms is a leading next generation entertainment company focused on redefining the way entertainment is created, distributed, marketed and consumed. AtomFilms has the largest catalog of award-winning animation and live-action entertainment available. A loyal supporter of independent filmmakers and animators, AtomFilms has built a platform for artists seeking worldwide distribution. AtomFilms markets and distributes high-quality short form entertainment to more than 80 partners and to audience's worldwide, with significant presence on major Internet sites, broadband services, television, airlines, home entertainment companies and more recently, handheld and wireless devices. A popular Web destination that is ranked among Media Metrix's top twenty entertainment sites, the two time Webby Award winner in Film and Broadband, AtomFilms was recently selected as the "Forbes Magazine Favorite" short film Web site. AtomFilms was also sited as one of the top ten most trafficked movie-related sites by Entertainment Weekly, and was rated "Best of the Web" for online entertainment by U.S. News & World Report. An independent company founded in 1998, AtomFilms has offices in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and London. More information about AtomFilms can be found on the Internet at http://www.atomfilms.com.
NOTE: Makin' Wookiee is a noncommercial event. None of the involved parties are deriving revenue from the contest. "Star Wars," "Wookiee," and other names associated with the Star Wars films are the property of Lucasfilm, Ltd. Lucasfilm Ltd. has neither authorized nor endorsed the Makin' Wookiee contest.