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MillimeterThe Sundance Beat
Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
If you know Joe Beirne, you've heard him worry out loud. Not in a panicky way — he just waits to be sure everything has worked before he starts taking compliments. As we huddled into a corner by the door of the NY Lounge on Main Street with Padre Nuestro DP Igor Martinovic, the last thing he was thinking about was the Grand Jury Prize (Padre Nuestro won six days later). He was, as a matter of fact, thinking about projector calibration.
One of the most nerve-wracking things about Sundance is that, on indie schedules, some filmmakers don't see their final prints until they are up on the screen in front of a bunch of people who can make or break their careers. Right behind them is a post supervisor who is responsible for the print and has a mental checklist of every possible thing that could have been missed or misunderstood on the indie budget workflow trail.
These are the Sundance worries I relate to — more so than whether the Ferrari watch salesperson will sell enough $10K watches to pay for the suites at the Stein Erikson Lodge (it seems people think they're supposed to be swag). And I don't, fortunately, have to press through the paparazzi and the barricades to get my oyster-colored, fur-trimmed ski parka autographed (but what a great idea — mine was dark red in a spectacular failure to be Sharpie-friendly).
It's easy to make fun of the Sundance circus, but it's just as easy to ignore it and concentrate on the technical stories that are always there. This Sundance was the most fluently digital one yet — even with a resurgent preference for film prints. There was a fine showing of Super 35-shot material, all the way down to Jennifer Fox's six-hour epic Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, culled from 1700 hours of Sony DSR-PDX10 footage (Sundance Channel bought it on sight). There were film-shot features, digitally shot features, some shot film/digital, some HD, some SD, a lot of Dis, assorted HD dailies workflows, and, of course, HDCAM prints. The results were, from a technical standpoint: uneven. Joe Beirne and Postworks, New York, did right by Padre's dark, atmospheric footage, but other filmmakers got prints that made you wince and wonder. So democracy is not perfect, but it is a lot more interesting. And it's very Sundance these days.
There's not room here to go into it all, but for a look back, check out blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/sundance. And read Senior Editor Michael Goldman's story about the Black Snake Moan workflow on p. 12.
