



Devoted to the art of making movies without using movie cameras, the Disposable Film Festival found the perfect poster child in Memoirs of a Scanner . The short film came about when three University of Southern California-groomed filmmakers used an HP photo scanner to shoot 300 live-action scans that were then strung together with an audio track to tell a tale packed with alienation, sex and violence.

Damon Stea of Mindfruit Studios made Memoirs of a Scanner with Cassandra Chowdhury and Zack DeZon.

“The shoot probably took around six hours of pure, unadulterated face-to-the-scanner animating, followed by pickup shots of all the papers and transitions,” Stea said. “Editing was pretty quick as well — it was a remarkably simple process to actually complete.”

Stea, a double-major in cinema production and videogame design at USC, ran into one technical difficulty. “It was hard to do lighting for a machine that was never meant to see a human face,” he said. “I tried to create a background that pleased me and fit with the aesthetic, but in the end, the scanner had a plan for the light and we worked with the hardware rather than fighting it.”



Memoirs of a Scanner is one of more than 50 films on tap at the four-day Disposable Film Festival, which opens Thursday in San Francisco. Now in its third year, the festival shows work produced with single-use video cameras, cellphones, point-and-shoot cameras, webcams, computer screen-capture software and other image-capture devices.

Noting that similar festivals have sprung up in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Japan and Brazil, festival co-founder Carlton Evans explains the disposable DIY aesthetic: “If you have a strong concept, you can take whatever you have and make a film.”

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