As you may have seen with some of our other posts these last few months, outdoor film screenings are more popular than ever this year. Each with it’s own unique take on the al fresco cinema experience, Folly for a Flyover offers a very unique spin on pop-up cinema.
It comes from the team behind last years Cineroleum, where an old petrol station was converted into a cinema. This time around the team had won the 2011 Bank of America Merrill Lynch CREATE Art Award and so built this outdoor cinema as part of this years Create11 Festival.
Set up under a flyover, in the gap between the East and Westbound traffic of the A12, An almost church like building has been constructed out of wood and scaffolding. Resembling a giant game of Jenga that got out of hand, it features an indoor bar/café, seating area and under the road itself seats for a few hundred and a cinema sized screen with the Lea Navigation canal running behind it.
The ideal setting to show some off-the-wall short pictures by emerging film makers, which was what we were treated to before the main event. Presented by the London International Animation Festival two very different animations were shown.
The multi-award winning ‘Mobile’ (2010) by Verena Fels was the first film shown, starring a very lonely cow who decides to make friends with some sheep, a dog, a couple of chickens, a pig and a budgie on the other side of a children’s mobile. This sounds a lot easier than it turns out to be, Oh yeah and there’s a little mouse too. Featuring some slick computer animation and humour reminiscent of the early Pixar shorts, this film delighted the crowd young and old.
‘Get Real’ (2010) by Evert Beijer was next up, a heavily stylised take on what playing computer games can do to an impressionable young man. Taking control of a body guard in a video game which resembled a badly drawn Grand Theft Auto, the young boy loses touch with reality whilst trying to save the life and win the love of a Cyber- Girl. Only returning to normality when he kisses a real live girl for the first time.
The nights main feature was Walt Disney’s TRON (1982) directed by Steven Lisberger. With a live soundtrack remix by East London producer Pablo Franco.
To review the film would be pointless, if you haven’t seen TRON get a copy and see it for yourself. At the time the movie was ground-breaking in many ways and laid the tracks for Disney’s Computer Animation Department which later became Pixar, so it’s well worth a watch as it has earnt a place in modern cinema and cult classic history.
The live soundtrack came as a bit of a shock to some of those who’d come to see it as the film opened with subtitles and no dialogue, unfortunately this made some people leave after a while, they probably hadn’t seen the film before and had difficulty following it but if they’d stuck it out with the rest of the audience they would have doubtless been swept up in this experience.
The accompanying music was engaging and corresponding enough to compete with the original score by pioneering electronic musician Wendy Carlos (famous for the Soundtracks of The Shining and A Clockwork Orange). If only speech samples of the original film had been worked into the music it may have been able to keep everyone’s attention from the start.
The feeling of watching TRON in that setting with the music echoing around you as cars drove overhead was strange, made even stranger still when people arrived to watch the film on canoes and a home made motorised catamaran.
If you get a chance to go to a Folly For a Flyover event this summer do it and don’t miss out, you would be in for a magical evening. The Folly is running until 31st July, the remaining lineup features some true film classics such as; Akira, Wizard of Oz, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Few Dollars More, among others. There are limited tickets left but check out their website for more details. DO NOT MISS!
MORE INFO:
Folly for a Flyover – www.follyforaflyover.co.uk
Create11 Festival, London – www.createlondon.org
The Floating Cinema – website
Barbican – Watch Me Move – website
