Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet

Name: Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 1 h 22 min
Rating: 7.8
Cast: Joshua Davis, Christopher Burke, Jeff Donaldson

IMDb RATING

7.8/10

YOUR RATING

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet (2008)

Documentary

'Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet' is a feature length documentary which delves into the movement known as ChipTunes, a vibrant underground scene based around creating new, original music ... Read all'Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet' is a feature length documentary which delves into the movement known as ChipTunes, a vibrant underground scene based around creating new, original music using old video game hardware. Familiar devices such as the Nintendo Game Boy and Nintendo... Read all'Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet' is a feature length documentary which delves into the movement known as ChipTunes, a vibrant underground scene based around creating new, original music using old video game hardware. Familiar devices such as the Nintendo Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System are pushed in new directions with startling results. Using New York ... Read all

Director
- Paul Owens
Stars

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

7.8/10

YOUR RATING

Director
- Paul Owens
Stars

See production info at IMDbPro

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Trivia
The version of the film that premiered at South by Southwest in 2008 was lost to a hard drive failure, so the entire film had to be re-cut from scratch for the DVD release in 2010.

Alternate versions
A director's cut appears on the dvd release. It is ten minutes shorter and features numerous other alterations to the original cut which played at festivals and aired on Pitchfork TV.

User reviews1

Review

Featured review

8/10

A fun documentary about amusing, clever music

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.