Disposable Film Festival Starts Thursday

A guiding principle of art, at least for those without a patron or trust fund, is work with what you've got. Cavemen and women used natural pigments and, well, cave walls, while modern primitives avail themselves of what's already in their hands, cell phones and webcams. The Disposable Film Festival -- a whimsical misnomer given the paucity of celluloid on display -- starts Thursday, and it seeks the most creative and accomplished shorts produced with amateur image-capture devices. Self-deprecating humor is a defining characteristic of this new medium. (Maybe pretentiousness doesn't coexist very well with D.I.Y. inventiveness or, thankfully, run-of-the-mill consumer electronics.)

That's the vibe we get from Christopher McManus, a Philadelphian who integrates animation and puppets in his irreverent, widely viewed "Hair and Diamonds" video series, one of which you'll see in the video clip above. In Saturday's 2 p.m. chat with Andrea Allen of Vimeo at Artists Television Access, McManus shows his work and opens a window on his not-very-tortured soul.

Saturday night, recent SF Weekly cover kids Pomplamoose host a workshop at CellSpace on producing and promoting "VideoSongs" for the Web, capping its fount of broadband-tested wisdom with a live set.

The festival shows that "disposable," as in digital, erasable, delete-able and ephemeral, does not mean worthless.

The Disposable Film Festival runs March 24-27 at multiple San Francisco locations. Admission is free-$12.

For more events in San Francisco this week and beyond, check out our calendar section.