Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet is a cool, fun documentary about the chip music scene, a number of active chip tunes artists, the Tank venue in NYC and the Blip Festival 2006.

If you're looking for more information about chiptunes this would be a great place to start. Nullsleep, Glomag, noteNdo and Bit Shifter are interviewed and account well for themselves. They are, unsurprisingly, a pretty geeky. But they are really charming and obviously pretty talented. The documentary has nice touches too in the use of Nintendo style graphics interspersed into the footage. It's simple and effective.

A number of the people in the film talk about how chiptunes are a form of re-use of technology for another purpose and how people are doing this kind of thing with all types of media and devices and that the internet has encouraged this kind of approach. Chris Burke is one of the people interviewed and it is interesting to note that he is involved with machinima and the 'This Spartan Life' series.

This documentary is well worth your time if you have any interest in this kind of thing.