Above: Screen capture from Android Porn, one of the DOTMOV 2012 winners.

The DOTMOV Festival Schedule has been announced over at SHIFT (who double up as the festival’s organizers). As usual, the festival will take place at select cities in Asia, North America and Europe.

For the latest information and more details, please see here.…

The winners of DOTMOV 2012 have been selected, and SHIFT will be hosting screenings of the 13 best shorts at locations around the world.

From their press release:

This year’s total submission of works is 194, coming from 16 different countries. The 13 works have been selected by the guest judges. The Screening of these videos on the websites and venues around the world is from November, 2012.

* The screening schedule of each venues will be released on the website from November 2012.

http://www.shift.jp.org/mov/

They have also released the first three shorts for your online consumption pleasure below (starting with the one pictured at …

SHIFT is once again accepting submissions for their world wide, digital short film festival. We’ve featured them for several years in a row now, and the results are always impressive!

From their blog:

Online magazine SHIFT presents DOTMOV Festival 2012, a digital film festival aiming to discover talented creators and provide them with an opportunity to show their works. Screening was took place in 20 places, Hong Kong, London, Stockholm, New York, India, Brazil etc besides Japan last year. Works submitted from all over the world will be screened throughout the world venues from November 2012. Last year’s total

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Bittersweet Fu (富中作樂) is an illustration lover’s graphic novel. The meticulous hand of its author, Ko Sing, is visible in every page. Whether it’s the distinct character design for each and every background character, or the lovingly rendered interior with the fisheye-lens perspective, Ko’s illustrations draw you in and make you look twice before you turn the page. Composition, perspective and character expressions are all exaggerated to humorous ends. The drawings dominate, while the story serves merely as a backdrop.

Yet just because Bittersweet Fu is heavy on illustrations doesn’t mean it’s an accessible work for everyone. The …

Another World was made during an era of PC gaming when single-creator works were still the norm. Rounabout the same year when Jordan Mechner was plumbing the depths of level design with the Prince of Persia, Eric Chahi was pushing the boundaries of narrative videogames with Another World. As Chahi declared at the project’s post-mortem at the recent Game Developers Conference, “I just knew I wanted to create a game with a cinematic feeling, with the theme of science fiction, in the rhythm of a movie.” And that he did, sleeplessly, for two years of his life.

Released 20 years …

The making and success of Scott Pilgrim are a sign that videogames really have infiltrated our popular consciousness. When captions such as “+9999 EXP” and “Level Up” are casually assigned to characters without explanation as punchlines, it presumes the audience understands the basic game framework of a hero gaining experience points through trials and subsequently leveling up their abilities when the accrued points hit a threshold. A mouthful to explain and, in the case of both Scott Pilgrim the comic and Scott Pilgrim the movie, a mouthful left unexplained for the unwitting members of the audience.

Originally produced as a …

Are you a Chinese speaker interested in practicing your written English skills, or an English speaker interested in practicing your Traditional Chinese interpretation? And an RPG fan? Here’s something that might interest you!

Verve Fanworks is in the process of fan-translating Dynasty International’s classic Chinese-language RPG, “幽城幻劍錄,” into English. Script translation is 75% complete, and the team is looking for a few more translators to push that measure all the way up to 100%! The original language is Traditional Chinese, and scripts can be provided to interested volunteers in a number of formats for greatest ease. Perfect …

You may have been wondering why we’ve been missing in action for the past few weeks, and if you’re reading this, you will have noticed that we’ve been hard at work on a major overhaul of the site.

Aside from the leap into color, we’ve also added two new sections that I hope reflect on our editorial vision:

• The Business of Cultural Exchange
  All about creating and commercializing pop culture. I hope to use this section to get under the hood of the cultural production process. Expect it to be filled with case studies, interviews and occasional reports of odd

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You play Stanley, the narrator declares, a content worker drone in a nondescript office. Sitting up from your desk at work one day, you realize that everyone is gone. The narrator shepherds you towards the cafeteria, to see where everyone’s gone. On your way there, you come across a set of two doors. The narrator tells to take the one on the left, which will lead you to the cafeteria. But do you continue to follow his instructions?

So begins the Stanley Parable, a remarkable work of interactive storytelling that’s been gathering steam across the Internet on sites big …

Many animated Japanese TV series are based on serialized comics that have already proved themselves in paper form. The relationship between comic and TV series varies; some animation studios stick close to the original while others run off with the plot and its characters, hoping to increase their chances for a blockbuster hit. Usually when studios take the latter route, the results are disastrous. In the worst cases, they distort and muddy the originally successful premise. In more benign cases, they stretch out the runtime by implementing a sequence of unnecessary plot detours. In the case of the 2003 adaptation …