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Sundance’s HD Entries

Feb 13, 2007 4:29 PM, By Craig Erpelding

The Sundance Film Festival has been the premiere showcase for indie-level filmmaking talent for almost three decades, and retains its focus on spotlighting the creative intent of filmmakers, rather than their technical know-how or choice of film or digital acquisition format. But this year’s festival did illustrate, among other things, that HD acquisition technologies are financially, technically, and creatively popular with indie filmmakers these days.

Certainly, HD delivery is already a must at Sundance. In fact, the festival requires all final cuts to be delivered in HDCAM 1080i at 59.94fps for screening at the event. For two of the HD-acquired movies in competition this year—both shot 1080p at 24fps—that requirement caused some exhibition concerns, according to filmmakers of the two films Starting Out in the Evening and Fay Grim.

Andrew Wagner, writer/director of Starting Out in the Evening, thought his movie converted well, but does concede he had to live with a touch of motion-blur for his film’s Sundance screening. Likewise, Fay Grim director Hal Hartley noticed a few doubled, interlaced frames during his movie’s screening, but only when those frames happened to fall on cuts. Other than those minor issues, both directors feel their movies looked great on the big screen in Park City, Utah—especially when considering the event at which they were being showcased, and the fact that both films were true indie projects made with modest resources.

Starting Out in the Evening was Wagner’s second movie to make it to Sundance. In 2005, his film, The Talent Given Us, was also selected—a movie starring his own family, and shot with a two-man crew (himself and a sound person) on a bare-bones budget of $30,000.

This time around, for Starting Out in the Evening, the budget wasn’t quite that tight, but at around $250,000 was still modest by feature film standards. That’s why Wagner originally looked at shooting the piece with a mid-grade HDV camcorder—he simply didn’t believe a quality HD system would fit into his budget. Then, New York City's Voom HD Pictures suddenly approached Wagner the day before his shoot was scheduled to start and offered to nearly double the budget on one condition—that Wagner shoot the movie in HD. Wagner was happy to oblige, and Voom HD provided his team with a Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta camera. Wagner says that upgrade helped make the production far more efficient during its crammed, 18-day, 100-page shoot.

Shooting onto HDCAM tape had two distinct advantages for Wagner as an indie filmmaker. The first was the fact that it allowed him to keep a sense of flow during the shoot, due to the lower cost of tape than film. Like many HD movie-makers, Wagner says he particularly enjoyed the luxury of continuing to roll camera between takes.

At the same time, Wagner felt comfortable working as a “conventional filmmaker” while using the HDW-F900 on the project.

“It’s pretty similar to working with 35mm,” Wagner says. “You still need a great DP and he needs a team to light the film. It is a big camera and we had a traditional crew, so it gave the feel of making a movie in the traditional sense.”

Fay Grim was also shot with an HDW-F900 camera. It was one of two HDNet Film productions to be selected for exhibition at the festival, the other being Broken English. HDNet Films is a high-definition production company founded by Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, Jason Kliot, and Joana Vicente in 2003, and is a sister company to Cuban’s HDNet, an all-HD television channel that finances and produces both narrative and documentary features shot HD. (For more on HDNet see the following articles from the Digital Content Producer: http://digitalcontentproducer.com/broadcast/video_maverick_network/index.html and http://digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/repurposement/index.html)

Kyle Gilman, assistant editor and postproduction supervisor on Fay Grim, points out the production’s crew had never shot HD before, but quickly got into the swing of things.

“Nobody on the crew had worked in HD before, so there was a lot of nail-biting at the beginning,” Gilman recalls. “We had a dead pixel on the first day of shooting, which didn’t help. So, just to make sure there wasn’t anything we were missing, I watched all of the HD footage on a [23in. Apple Cinema HD] monitor as it was being down-converted to DVCAM for the offline. It was really amazing to see everything as it came in. I knew it would be good, but [Hartley] and [DP] Sarah Cawley were doing really incredible stuff with [the F-900]. The colors are really vibrant and sharp in a way that film is not.”

Still, while finishing production, Gilman and crew were primarily watching the imagery on a 24in. CRT monitor, so the first time they fully understood what they had was when the movie was projected 24p HDCAM at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“We did a test before the premiere to make sure everything was working OK,” Gilman says. “I just sat in the huge empty theater and said, ‘this is the future.’ I see no reason to shoot on film anymore.”

Still, Gilman points out that while indie filmmakers are excited about the prospect of having HD as a primary, and affordable, option, the indie ambiance at places like Sundance will remain unchanged&3151;with a focus on substance, rather than method.

“Over the next few years, you really will have the ability to shoot beautiful, high-resolution images for very little money,” Gilman says. “But I don’t know how much difference that’s going to make—you can make great films on DV, and you can make terrible films on 35mm.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.