Tampere starts cross-festival initiative to digitise shorts

Finland’s Tampere Film Festival is working with reelport on an initiative to digitise European short films being submitted to festivals.

Tampere and reelport have digitised more than 3500 shorts so far, for the video library of the Tampere Film Market.

Of course, other festivals from Rotterdam to Dubai offer digital libraries of the films in their programmes; Tampere’s initiative goes a step further, inviting other festivals to send their DVDs to Tampere/reelport to be digitised and encoded and available for stream/download at participating festivals.

They hope to have more than 10,000 short films digitised by the end of 2010 by working with other festivals.

“Since many festivals share the same submissions, combining the efforts would lower the costs and minimize the efforts for everybody involved,” Tampere said in a statement. “The goal of this project is to get rid of DVD screeners in the festival’s workflow…Thousands of DVDs are submitted to short film festivals around the world. They need to be labelled, stored and finally destroyed. If programmers are based elsewhere in the world, DVDs need to be shipped with high costs and loss of time. In the festivals film markets, only one DVD can be watched by one person at a time and huge piles of DVDs need to be searched to find films of interest. And finally, hundreds of thousands of DVDs create waste that pollutes our environment.”

The Tampere Film Festival ran March 10-14.