Tickets available here!

The 2nd Annual Robot Film Festival will take place July 14, 2012 in New York City. This year’s theme: “Are Robots Man’s New Best Friend?” If last year’s video gallery is anything to go by, this year’s collection of short films will be outstanding, dazzling, hilarious and thought-provoking! Whether real or fictional, all submissions feature robots as one of the main characters as or framing devices of the narrative. Founded by Heather Knight of Marilyn Monrobot & Carnegie Mellon University and co-organized by Marek Michalowski of Beatbots, the festival’s goal is to highlight innovation, explore frontiers before technically feasible and investigate the impact of humanity and machinery interrelations.

After a full day of juried film screenings interspersed with live performances, the finale is a red carpet Botskers Award ceremony (think Robot Oscars). It is here that films will be in the running for a coveted Botsker, 3D printed robot statuettes whose titles have been robotically milled. Prepare yourselves for a dazzling 100-foot red carpet, specially concocted cocktails and a diverse and  interdisciplinary community that lives beyond the event!

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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!