This is not your ordinary Film Festival. The crowning feature of Saturday night is a black tie red carpet Botskers award ceremony (think Robot Oscars). It is here that films will be in the running for a coveted ‘botsker’ awards – 3D printed robot statuettes whose titles have been robotically milled carved out by a robot. Prepare yourselves for a dazzling 100-foot red carpet, specially concocted cocktails and live human and machine performances!

With the goal of creating an  interdisciplinary community that lives beyond the event, the days are  structured more like a TED event than a traditional film festival and  attendees are encouraged to block out the whole day or weekend.  In  addition to the Botsker Awards and cocktail party there is a full day of juried film screenings interspersed with performances on Saturday and make-your-own-film workshops, and robot themed BBQ on Sunday. Venue details to come.

2011 TEAM:
Executive Director/Producer: Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot and Carnegie Mellon
Co-producers: Suzan Eraslan & Kevin Laibson of Magic Future Box Productions
Jury Coordinator: Chrys Wu, NYC-based national organizer of Hacks/Hackers
Video Coordinator: Marek Michalowski of BeatBots
Art Curators: Natalie Be’er & Lily Szajnberg of NYU’s ITP
Executive Robot: Data the robot: robotic comedian premiered at TED

2011 JURY:
Annie Leahy: Executive Producer of Poptech, formerly at Tribeca
Andrew McGregor: Founder of Tiziano Project and the Graphation Film Festival
Celeste Biever: Physical Sciences News Editor at New Scientist Magazine
Jer Thorp: Data Visualization guru at BLPRNT, Artist in Residence at NYTimes R & D
Ken Perlin: Director of the Games for Learning Institute at NYU
Kenyatta Cheese: Eyebeam Advisory Board, formerly Rocketboom
Reid Simmons: Robotics Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University
Simone Davalos: co-founder of RoboGames, guest blogger at Laughing Squid
Ventura Castro: Graphics Producer at NBC Artworks, Founder of F5 Festival

CONTRIBUTORS:
Festival Illustrations: Valerie Schoman of VHSart and Nickelodeon
Botsker Award Designer: Shawn Sims of CMU Computational Design Lab

Our goals for the festival are quite staid and moderate:
-Encourage interdisciplinary collaboration
-Harness the creativity of non-roboticists to expose new insights about robot character, behavior systems and impactful physical design
-Make engineering and robotics intriguing and assessable
-Enable technologists to explore the downstream effects of their innovations through storytelling
-Help explore the ethical and sociological issues everyday robots could have on society
-Make engineering fun
-Start a community that can build on itself
-Provide guidance through curation of content, framing, and followup
-Pilot an intersection between narrative and robotics, using film making, that could enable future explorations
-Provide opportunity for researchers to translate their work to the general population
-Gain practice for technologists to display their research in engaging video form
-Showcase awesome robots
-Display the breadth of work possible with robots
-Entice individuals that might not be intrigued by standard robot competitions
-Expose positive memes about robotics that answer to the Terminator myths
-Celebrate the big ideas behind it all!