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Technology at Sundance

Jan 1, 2006 11:31 AM, by Cynthia Wisehart

You can find lots of information about the scene and films at Sundance. But that's not why we go. We're on the hunt for technology. Our beat is the Film Center at 333 Main Street in the heart of Park City, right across from the famed Egyptian Theater. We seek out the alleys and restaurants where cinematographers and editors lurk, celebrating one of the most important opportunities of their lives in relative anonymity.

This year, the Film Center (formerly known as the Digital Media Center) got a swank upgrade with Mies van de Rohr chairs, nice lighting, and great wireless connections. It was one of the best non-alcoholic hangouts at Sundance, home to gear, technology panels and workshops, and the Online Film Festival. Sundance director of digital initiatives, Ian Calderon, understands that just because it's technology doesn't mean it has to be lit with fluorescents and that people who like technology also like good coffee, humus salads, and the occasional pinspot on a lime-green orchid.

As always, the Film Center was sponsored by HP, a ubiquitous technology partner of Sundance, with many venues throughout the festival and a longstanding relationship with the Sundance Institute. Co-sponsors in the Film Center include Intel, Adobe, and Sony.

In 2006, perhaps more than any previous year, the sponsor lineup says something about where filmmaking is headed. This year, the panels on podcasting, mobile phones, and other non-traditional distribution networks were all packed. Intel's Digital Experience Zone modeled the digital living room and casual conversation picked up on themes of self-distribution, non-traditional content, and the like.

Now, I've been around a long time, and I can say that most of this was clearly blue-sky. But the impulse is still important: digital content creation is maturing to the point that it is virtually standard -- one of the festival's most-honored films was shot on a little Panasonic DVX100. It's safe to say that all were cut on workstations running software that cost at the most five-figures and maybe even under a grand.

There are still many issues to be addressed in digital content creation. The wealth of new camera formats brings many benefits but also many gotchas. But increasingly, as people become more fluent in these tools and formats, the full weight of the DCC opportunity begins to clarify.

In particular HP, and more recently Intel and Adobe, have begun to portray the content creator at the hub of digitally-enabled creativity, emphasizing workflow, the handoff from program to program, ease of deliverables, scalability, and a definition of performance that comes from Adobe's Jim Guerard: performance in completing the program. By that he means: never mind featuresets -- can you get the whole job done and done right?. It's easy to abuse these concepts with marketing, but in fact powerful digital and desktop infrastructures are inseparable from the future of filmmaking and indeed, culture and communication. A festival panel devoted to what models of content creation and distribution will mean danced on the very tip of a fascinating iceberg.

So don't tell me they're just tools.

At Sundance, I didn't get anywhere near the hype. I wasn't invited. Instead I met an incredible range of people who had gravitated to making films for reasons that were pretty remote from fame. They were filmmakers first, of course, but they understood their tools and what those tools meant to the creative landscape in a very material way. Not one of them seemed "techy" yet all were technically fluent. This was extremely gratifying to see and hear about: it was Haskell Wexler planning to spend his 80s as a guerilla DV activist; Peter Richardson (nearly six decades younger) earnestly extolling the virtues of the "essay" long-form documentary and making DV look like film; Mauricio Rubenstein sharing his adventures on the first XDCAM feature; remix entrepreneur Chris Brickler envisioning a collaborative, web-based "docu-community"; young DP Ryan Samul recounting a cinematographer's timeless high of capturing the moment; or director Laurie Collyer and DP Russell Fine molding poetry onto 16mm.

For me, the relationship between a filmmaker and his tools, the rush of knowing that those tools saw what you want them to see, or captured what's at your fingertips or moved as quickly as your brain is something to aspire to. I know it doesn't happen all the time -- or sometimes very often -- I know the litany of frustrations of wrangling pixels and most of the time that's what I concentrate on helping out with. But at Sundance I did have a glimpse of why engineers keep trying -- it's to deliver machines that feel like allies in the desperate urge to tell stories.

To read about some of what we saw and heard at Sundance visit our Sundance Blog.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.