EXCLUSIVE: The Sundance Institute and Peter Luo’s Stars Collective (Crazy Rich Asians, Midway, Marshall, Scary Stories to Tell within the Dark) have partnered on the brand new Imagination Award that grants $25,000 every to 3 metaverse-based tasks that present innovation “in a quickly evolving mediascape.”
Candidates had been submitted to the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Program with winners had been chosen by fest programmers and reps of Stars Collective, a expertise incubator.
The award extends a Sundance-Stars Collective partnership from 2020 that launched the Granting Fund to help numerous filmmakers from traditionally marginalized communities. The money has offered undertaking development and completion help to over 30 movies thus far, together with works by Jamila Wignot (Ailey), Alison O’Daniel (Tuba Thieves), Nikyatu Jusu (Nanny) and Isabel Castro (Mija). Nine have premiered at Sundance.
Inaugural Imagination Award winners:
40 Acres: Lead Artist, Tamara Shogaolu. A multi-platform exploration of Black American farmers and herbalists and their altering relationship to the land.
Block Party Bodega: Lead Artists, Navid Khonsari, Vassiliki Khonsari, Andres Perez-Duart. “A psychedelic Banksy meets Brooklyn open world universe celebrating tradition, variety, and artistic mischief the place cooperation is king, competitors is a celebration, and gamers are the mercenaries of pleasure.”
Year 2180: Lead Artist, Vanessa Keith. A multi-platform recreation set in a digital utopian world the place gamers can undertake local weather quests in numerous cities to avoid wasting our future.
“We are very excited to affix forces with Sundance as soon as once more to help filmmakers with concepts and the flexibility to innovate,” stated Luo. “The movie business has developed to some extent the place it wants revolutionary genres, types, narrative constructions, expressions, and enterprise fashions which might be extra in tune with the present occasions. The third revolution of the Internet may also have a profound impression on cinema. We at Stars Collective will proceed to help filmmakers on this route.”
“Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program is elated to affix forces with Stars Collective, an organization that now we have joyfully discovered an alignment in values round diversifying our neighborhood of creators, and rising very important, human centered innovation on our dynamic media panorama,” stated Shari Frilot, Sundance fest senior programmer and chief curator of New Frontier.
The award go to so-called Metaverse Ecosystem Projects and might be narrative, non-narrative, movies, movies or TV sequence and in any inventive format — digital, movie and VR/AR/MR/X — in the event that they “present a whole metaverse worldview and visible idea.” Entrants should present “inventive creativity, ecological extensibility of the meta-universe, and IP industrial feasibility.”
Stars Collective will launch its web3 movie platform Footage and its metaverse platform, SC Meta, within the present first quarter.
The venure financed and co-produced Justin Chon’s Sundance-premiereing music drama Jamojaya with Indonesian rapper Rich Brian that performed in Park City to nice evaluations in final week. Chon and Alan Pao (Under The Silver Lake) are producers. The movie is executive-produced by Luo, Chris Lee (Superman Returns), Jennifer Pritzker and Shaun Sanghani (The Fallout).
Others embody Nezouh, directed by Soudade Kaadan, which gained the Armani Beauty Audience Award on the Venice movie pageant; Playland, artist-filmmaker Georden West’s debut characteristic, which can premiere within the Tiger Competition on the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Wuhan Wuhan, directed by Yung Chang, produced by Donna Gigliotti, Diane Quon and government produced by Donnie Yen.
Luo, an advocate for bringing Asian tradition to Hollywood, has brokered content material offers with outstanding filmmakers resembling Robert Zemeckis, Sam Raimi, Sylvester Stallone, James Wan, F. Gary Gray, Roland Emmerich and Jon Chu.
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