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ME Exclusives
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| Drux Flux-Courtesy NFB.com | Jim Holt
Movie Entertainment
February 2010
The man at the centre of the National Film Board of Canada’s 70th anniversary party in Los Angeles finds a quiet corner table at which to talk. He’s excited and he has something magical he wants to share.
NFB chairman Tom Perlmutter snaps into place at the table, grins and pulls an iPhone from his pocket. He pokes the NFB logo that appears – hardly magical anymore, but he’s still grinning. He dips into his other pocket, pulls out a pair of paper glasses and pecks again at the device. This time, the result is undeniably magical.
Suddenly, at the table, in the middle of Hollywood’s Arclight Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, in the cradle where silent films began amazing the world a century ago, a complete – albeit tiny – multi-dimensional world of vivid colour and dynamic sound unfolds inside a pair of cupped hands, all in seamless, uninterrupted online streaming.
After almost three-quarters of a century making animation films, documentaries and alternative dramas that are accessible to Canadians, the NFB is kicking off 2010 by offering the world free online streaming of its 3-D movies, including such titles as Falling in Love Again and Drux Flux.
In Los Angeles for the anniversary party, along with Oscar-winning NFB filmmakers Chris Landreth (Ryan, TheSpine), Cordell Barker (Runaway) and Bruce Alcock (Vive la Rose) as well as Canada’s consul-general in Los Angeles, David Fransen, Perlmutter could not contain his enthusiasm about the NFB’s technological evolution.
“This is something tremendous,” he says. “We’re going 3-D on our iPhone app ... It’s just the start. We’re experimenting. But we’re one of the first to offer this service.”
The NFB was first set up in 1939 to document Canada at war and, since then, has vigorously pursued a mandate of making uniquely Canadian films – films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations – and make these films available to all Canadians. Along the way its films have earned 70 Academy Award nominations and collected 12 Oscars.
In October, the NFB launched its first iPhone application that enabled Canadians – and the world – to access an archive of 13,000 films. Anyone can now watch hundreds of films including Oscar-winning animation and documentaries in the palm of their hand, and no group wants this more, it seems, than we Canadians do.
“Canadians are the world’s largest consumer of online video,” Perlmutter explains.
In the first three weeks of its “hit” launch, the NFB logged 100,000 downloads of its free (2-dimensional) iPhone application and more than three million views of its online site.
“We have made a lot of [films] available that were not available before,” he says. “We were accessible to Canadians but we lost it for a while. We were available on television, but on television we disappeared somewhat.
Now, the video appetite for content online is tremendous. Now we’re connecting with a whole new generation.”
The launch of its 3-D iPhone application will enable the NFB to further fulfill its mandate of accessibility by putting its films online and in the hands of Canadians – literally.
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