Marvin Ancian
Immerse yourself in the world of Swiss film technology at the Filmtech trade fair, to be held in tandem with the European Film Awards on 6 and 7 December.
The immersion will be almost palpable. The Filmtech trade fair will take place at Lucerne’s Neubad, a former municipal indoor swimming pool repurposed as a cultural space and workshop. The latest advances in audio-visual technology of all kinds will be exhibited in the former pool: discover Swiss cinematic innovations virtually, on screen, and in talks and round-table discussions. For Mirko Bischofberger, who was commissioned by the Federal Office of Culture to organise the exhibition, the aim is clear: “The technologies behind the cultural sector should be made visible.”
The trade fair programme, which will be hosted by Swiss comedian and AI artist Patrick Karpiczenko, poses three main questions: How do Swiss film technologies impact the film world around the globe? What role do modern start-ups play in this? And what kind of film art can be made with the help of certain technologies? In line with this, Sarah Kenderdine, professor of Digital Museology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), will share her expertise on interactive installations that fuse cinema and augmented reality to enable digital representations of historic or archaeological sites.
Artificial intelligence will be another prominent discussion point. Simon Jacquemet has spent five years on his film, “Electric Child”, the story of a computer scientist who makes a pact with an artificial intelligence life form to save his newborn child afflicted by a rare illness. In Lucerne, Jacquemet will describe the making of this cinematographic and technological adventure, which deals with the subject of artificial intelligence, but was also developed thanks to it. “Switzerland has always been a country at the forefront of technology. This also applies to the use of audiovisual technologies, for example, in computer sciences, robotics and engineering. In the 1950s, the Nagra tape recorder was developed by an engineering student at the EPFL. Thanks to this development and for the first time in the history of cinema, a single person could carry a high-quality recording device on their shoulder and move around freely without heavy equipment. This small revolution in the art of sound recording earned Switzerland two Academy Awards in 1978 and 1991,” explains Bischofberger. A more recent example is the start-up Faceshift, which developed a technology in 2012 to create animated avatars that can capture a person’s facial expressions in real time. This technology can be used in film productions to improve the animation of characters and imitate the facial movements of the actors in better ways. It has been used, for example, in productions such as “Star Wars”. In 2015, it was acquired by Apple.