Rinkside Films

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Rinkside Films, or simply Rinkside, is a small budget films company that was founded in 2003 in Vancouver, WA by Colin Astete and Dan Murphy. The group expanded slowly, originally producing short skit-like sketches before adapting to create larger, more involved feature-length parodies. Rinkside is one of many groups, especially prevalent on the west-coast, that concomitantly seeks to both facilitate and popularize digital media while promoting the globalization of independent films and other smaller-budgeted works. Primarily, by stressing local involvement in projects and holding public viewings of films at fairs and social events, Rinkside’s popularity may reflect a growing, global cultural network of independent and/or amateur films works that, through entities such as youtube, may reach a vast and potentially unlimited audience.

Most recently, Rinkside has developed feature length parodies, primarily satirizing popular, large-budget, epic film franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, Superman, Spider-man, and a myriad of historical, period epics such as Braveheart, Kingdom of Heaven, and Gladiator. Perhaps most significantly, these parodies or reinterpretations may increasingly demonstrate the degree to which the accessibility of various popular entities such as songs, sounds, licenses, etc. are fundamentally changing the way the public may interact with various forms of digital media.

Before adopting the name “4Leaf Clover,” the group was relatively pedestrian in its outlook, yet advances in digital technology, editing, and sound mixing, all of which are relatively standard to even casual film enthusiasts, have grown more ambitious in their choice of projects scheduled for release in 2008 and 2009. Though the group's popularity continues to increase, likely corroborated and presupposed by a receptive community of amateur film-makers, their films will presumably still be produced on a relatively small budget.

Principal Rinkside members include Colin Astete, Caroline Chaparro, Stephanie Fajardo, Ben Iberle, Nathan Kenney, Jake Lubenow, Mychal Ludwig, Dan Murphy, Tim Murphy, Timothy Rice, and Wayne Tanner. Since its origination, though, the group has steadily expanded. Due to the notably decentralized and non-binding nature of the organization, many additional artisans, and employees have collaborated upon past Rinkside projects.