The Illudium Film Society

The Illudium Film Society was founded by Bill Anderton. Bill’s hobby is film history, and he established this film society to bring high-quality cinema, particularly obscure, notable films or long-forgotten films, to the public in special screenings and festival formats. The society seeks to screen "films that change the way we see."

The Illudium Film Society was formed for just the love of film, particularly science fiction, and is a family effort. Bill's daughter, Ms. Austin Anderton is in charge of the Society's outreach, endeavoring to increase awareness of the Society's films to high-school and college students. One of the objectives of the Society is film education. The Anderton's noticed that the recent reboots of Sci-Fi programs such as Dr. Who are very popular among Austin's generation. These programs and films have very large and active fandoms, but few know of the long history of the films in this genre.

The Society consists of people willing to adopt one or more films for full curation and development of the film's full history. When ready, curators will present their films at the regular screenings of the Society as a whole. Curators are all volunteers and are (or become) experts in their films. The rest of the Society consists of people with an interest in the Society's films and their screenings.

The Illudium Film Society's Summer Sci-Fi Film Series will begin in Dallas during the Summer, 2015. The series will re-introduce some of the early notable Sci-Fi films to a new generation of young people with little prior exposure to the roots of the genre. The Society will host two theme-related and notable films per evening and feature a presentation by the films' curator/film historian discussing the films. Each monthly session of the film series will be publicly hosted and open to the members of the Society and the general public.

New Website and New Programming

The Illudium Film Society is setting up a new web site in June 2020 for the announcement of its Fall 2020 programming. See https://illudiumfilm.com for details. Prior to the COVID-19 lockdown we were planning on a Fall 2020 physical film festival. Now, we are uncertain. We may do a later physical festival or do a third online film festival.

The Name

In case you are wondering, the term "illudium" comes from the classic 1948 Looney Tunes cartoon, "Haredevil Hare" directed by Chuck Jones and starring Bugs Bunny.

"Haredevil Hare" introduced the character Marvin the Martian, although he was unnamed at the time of the cartoon's release. On the Moon, Marvin was trying to use the "Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator" to blow up Earth because it blocked his view. Although the space modulator resembled a mere stick of dynamite (complete with fuse), the "PU" descriptor is the scientific notation for chemical element plutonium used in atomic weapons. It implied an atomic-scale Martian technology sufficient to obliterate Earth. Of course, Bugs steals the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator and Marvin's attempt fails. Marvin exclaims, "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"

The term "illudium" implies whimsy, a relationship with SciFi (one of the specialties of the Society) and an "earth shattering" implication. In an early promotion of the society, the tagline, "The Illudium Film Society: The Kaboom Is Here" was used to position the Society.

Illudium Film Society's First Online Film Festival

We conducted our first Online Film Festival during March 6-8, 2015. The festival was presented in cooperation with the Illudium Film Society. During the festival, our visitors viewed the films we presented and voted for the awards presented by the Governors of the Illudium Film Society.

The film festival was a great success. During the run of the two-and-a-half-day festival, we fielded almost seven-thousand requests to view the films being presented.

We are reprising the film festival just for the fun of doing it again and to provide some online entertainment for our students and visitors.

This is a totally online festival. We are presenting the festival's films via high-quality Adaptive Streaming Media Services. Details can be found via the buttons in the sidebar to the right. All you need to participate is a broadband connection and a web browser.

Our online film festival is FREE and open to anyone as a public service.

In the times of big-budget studio films, see what a bunch of folks can do with almost no budget, free software and lots of talent!

The Films Presented

Four of our films are from the open-source film movement and are short subjects from 10-15 minutes in duration. They are multiple award winners from other international film festivals. The four open-source films we will be presenting are:

1. Elephants Dream (2005)
2. Big Buck Bunny (2008)
3. Sintel (2010)
4. Tears of Steel (2012)
5. From Little Acorns (2010)

We proudly present all five films in our first online film festival. To screen the films, click on the links above or use the buttons found in the sidebar.

All four films and all of the software used to make these films are free, open source or very low cost. Also, the four of the five films being presented as well as all of their work product are also open source and freely available without licensing fees. The films are free to display anywhere.

The fifth film is "From Little Acorns" (2010), which has been carried on this website for the last three years as a reference test of our Adaptive Streaming capabilities. For the film festival, it has been re-mastered and re-encoded using our new media platform. It is shown here as a reference sample of the capabilities of our new platform for our current students who have seen this sample from our old platform (which was very good but has been surpassed by our new one.)

Curation Services

Bill and the Illudium Film Society arrange to get the source materials of each of the films for our uses from their copyright holders and perform the re-mastering of each film. Getting our hands on the open-source material is what allowed us to build new high-quality masters.

Also, Bill and his Society secured the legal permissions to use the films and display them in this film festival. 

The Society has also provided all of the curation services of the films during our re-mastering process. Curation ensures that every frame of the film is being displayed in the way that the films were shown in their original presentation and as intended by their directors.

Since our distribution file sets came from uncompressed originals (rather than the low-quality compression typically used for online viewing), these films will be displayed as close to their original quality as our users' devices and broadband connections will allow.

Festival Awards

Sunday night, March 8th, after live viewer voting closed, we awarded the Festival Governors Award and the Viewers Choice Award. The festival's Governors' Award was granted by the Governors of the Illudium Film Society who are all film buffs, film historians or film curators. Votes from viewers cast during the run of the festival decided the Viewers Choice Award. The straight number of file views determined the Most Viewed Award.

Voting for the awards is now closed. The awards from our first Online Film Festival are as follows:

1. The Governors' Award – “Sintel”
2. Viewers Choice Award – “Big Buck Bunny”
3. Most-Viewed Award - "From Little Acorns"

Results from the First Online Film Festival

The official run of the festival was for 57 hours from 2pm CST, Friday, March 6 through 10pm, CDT Sunday, March 8. Plus, there was a one-hour preview beginning at 7pm CST, Thursday, March 5.

At that time, the festival attendees made 6,956 requests to view the films (on average, each film was viewed twice).

The geographic distribution of visitors from the USA was as follows:

Internationally, we also served visitors from Canada, Norway, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Australia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Paraguay.

Second Online Film Festival - July 18-24, 2016

The Illudium Film Society presented its second online film festival July 18 - 24, 2016. The online festival will begin at 2pm CDT on Monday, July 18 and run through midnight, Sunday, July 24.

The festival presented the documentary, "MoonScape" about the Apollo 11 moon landing and moonwalk that occurred on July 20, 1969. MoonScape was produced by a team led by Paolo Attivissimo, a British-Swiss-Italian science journalist, and longtime space enthusiast.

the online film festival is timed to occur during the 47th anniversary of the July 20, 1969, moon landing.

The event was presented via our in-house high-quality streaming media services. All you need to participate is a broadband connection and a web browser. Our online film festival is FREE and open to anyone as a public service.

MoonScape is an open-source documentary produced and funded by space enthusiasts, featuring restored and remastered video, film footage and photographs presented in chronological order beginning with the moon landing and running through the entire extra-vehicular activity (EVA). The material is presented in its entirety. The runtime of the documentary is three hours and twenty-seven minutes (207 minutes.)

All of the source material has been restored, re-scanned and digitized from the best available sources. The live TV broadcast, the 16mm color film footage shot on the Moon and in Mission Control, and the Hasselblad 70mm color photographs taken by astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, have been fully synchronized with the audio recordings (including the onboard and Mission Control recordings) and are presented in real-time, as they happened, with full subtitles in English.

Results from the Second Online Film Festival

We now have final usage reports from the entire run of the festival. In total, we served 10,713 views of MoonScape. This number only includes the number of times our media platform served the movie and doesn't count the number of people attending the festival via viewing parties. Viewing party attendance was not requested and would not typically be reported to us.

This attendance number is a significant increase of 54% over last year's First IFS Online Film Festival that had 6,656 attendees. This year's attendance figures make this year's festival the best-attended single online event in our history. Another highlight includes the fact that almost 10% of our viewers watched the documentary using our new Chromecast feature that was debuted for the festival. We assume the Chromecast feature was used in watch parties to facilitate group viewing.

The event was so successful, based on popular demand among educators, the event was spun off into a standalone website apollo-11.tv to provide a continuously operating website for STEM education.