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

…

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 …

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 …

Between 2001 and 2010, Brian Clevinger went from an amateur webcomic author to a professional comic book writer, sought after by  Marvel and DC. This nine year span also marks the life of 8-bit Theatre, a free, online serial that put his name on the map and propelled him into the comic book industry. As Clevinger himself admits during interviews, “8-bit Theatre gave me the platform, experience, and confidence to launch Atomic Robo years later… and Robo lead to the Marvel stuff.” But it would be wrong to belittle 8-bit Theatre as merely an online forum …

Almost twenty years after its publication, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1992) is still the best reference point for a “serious” comic book or graphic novel. Written and illustrated by Art Spiegelman, Maus tells the story of Spiegelman’s father’s Holocaust experience and is framed by the artist’s interviews with his father in the present day. An unintended consequence of this narrative style is that some of the book’s best moments happen not in the past but in the present, and by the end Maus is as much “a survivor’s tale” as it is about a troubled father-son relationship. Because of the …

Mass Effect 2 is a hybrid action and roleplaying game (RPG) set in a sci-fi world. It was first released by Canadian game studio Bioware in 2010 and is the second game in a trilogy.

The first thing I noticed in Mass Effect 2 was that my character, Commander Shepard, was charismatic. Her words, gait and voice belied a fierce and attractive personality that went far beyond the charisma points on her statistics sheet. The writers had given her a personality from the start instead of relying on the clumsy industry standard of a blank canvas avatar. It helps that …

The Misra Legacy Compilation I is a fantastic, and free, mixtape of North American indie rock. Details reposted from Crawdaddy:

Out with the old Bracys, in with the new. Misra has always been a fiercely pro-artist record label, founded as it was in 1999 by an activist (Future of Music Coalition co-founder Michael Bracy), an artist (brother Tim Bracy of the Mendoza Line), and an attorney (Paige Conner Totaro). Cranking out albums by artists including Will Johnson, Jenny Toomey, and Destroyer, the reins of the solid indie label were transferred over to Cory Brown, head of Absolutely Kosher, who

…

I first ran into Portal (2007) at the Game Developers Conference in 2008. I was interested in narrative and gaming at the time, and had wandered into the session hoping to learn something new about the subject. I had not played Portal at that point, nor did I know that it had been crowned game of the year by various gaming publications and by the conference attendees themselves. I did however notice that the room quickly became packed with people.

The talk, “Integrating Narrative and Design: A Portal Post-Mortem,” was fantastic. I was pleasantly surprised that a first-person shooter puzzle …

Sharon Van Etten’s Epic (2010) comes at a strange time for indie rock. The genre is undergoing growing pains from its once haloed position as the alternative to “alternative rock.”

In one respect, indie rock’s become the hot new thing: The Arcade Fire’s the Suburbs topped charts in the US, UK and Canada (amongst other places) and the band has become a staple of twenty-somethings around the world. Yet chart-topping indie rock rarely pushes any artistic boundaries, and the Suburbs is no exception — it sounds “nice” enough though.

On the other hand, there are still some small-time, indie acts …

“This American Life? Is that that show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are? Gawd!”

That piece of silly dialogue from TV (specifically the OC) just about sums up the This American Life radio show (1995-ongoing). Host and co-creator Ira Glass agrees; he responded to the reference weeks later with an emphatic “yes!”

Each episode of This American Life follows a theme, and attacks this theme from multiple angles in a series of acts. Some themes end up working better than others — take the week they did the Giant Pool of …