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Digital Sundance

Feb 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart

From Camera to Screen

Sidebar
Animation @ Sundance
Podcasts @ Sundance

In 2003, Dutch director Theo Van Gogh and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Thomas Kist, made one of their last films together with three Sony DVCAM DSR-570s — Kist and two colleagues shooting simultaneously in the round. At this year's Sundance, Kist says he reprised the technique for director Steve Buscemi for a remake of Interview starring Buscemi and Sienna Miller. This time, the cameras were XDCAM PDW510s, but the idea, Kist says, was the same: freedom for the actors to improvise and move, and continuity for editor Kate Williams, who always had three camera angles from the same take.

Filmmaker Jennifer Fox traveled the world for years with a Sony DSR-PDX10. She describes passing the camera back and forth as a way to visually capture the “thickness of women's conversations.” About 1,700 hours of conversation became the six-hour epic, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.

Screenwriter John August made his directorial debut with The Nines, a triptych of stories each partially defined by its camera format, according to Laser Pacific's Glenn Kimmel (Laser did the DI). The HDV footage was intended to convey the atmosphere of a reality show as August blurred the line between the real world and the filmed one.

For these projects, technology was dictated as much by storytelling and performance as budget. This is a sign of the times at Sundance, where filmmakers are increasingly sophisticated and individual about digital options. Workflows are unique, sometimes daring. Fox's Technical Director Patrick Lindenmaier, for example, built two Avid Xpress Pros into a network with 13 drives — and it worked. In fact, Avid Xpress Pro turns up in many Sundance workflows — but so does Avid Nitris. So it really is “choose your weapons.”

Not to say that all digital tools delivered equally good results. There were beautiful digital prints made from Varicam-shot footage (I'm thinking of High Falls). But there were disappointing prints — both film and digital of material shot on various formats. Filmmakers told of inscrutable workflow problems — just listen to our podcast with Protagonist director Jessica Yu at digitalcontentproducer.com/podcasts). Others, like Fox, sailed smoothly through unlikely digital workflows — and everything in between.

Not surprisingly, the self-styled godfather of HD, producer Mark Cuban, also contributed to the digital lineup at Sundance. In the case of Cuban and his partners in HDNet Films, HD is a mission as well as a practicality. HDNet Films had two films in competition: Hal Hartley's Fay Grim, shot by Sarah Cawley on a Sony CineAlta, and Zoe R. Cassavetes' Broken English, shot by John Pirozzi on a Thomson Viper FilmStream. For more on Fay Grim and on Andrew Wagner's CineAlta-shot Starting Out in the Evening, see digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/digital_sundance.

Sundance embraced digital — awkwardly at first with a combination of conviction and ambivalence. There are enough distractions at Sundance already, so festival organizers didn't want technology to be another. Yet digital prints opened the Sundance door to a wider range of filmmakers, and represented nearly 30 percent of last year's major screenings. This year, there was something of a swing back to film prints, even as Sundance went still further to embrace digital distribution. The short films were available on iTunes, and Sundance sponsored a cell phone film festival; the pieces are set to be unveiled in Barcelona as we go to press. Ian Calderon, head of digital initiatives for Sundance, presided over the New Frontier on Main, which combined digital technology demonstrations and classes with avant-garde installations that blended art and film on video canvases, breaking out of the so-called “white box”. When it comes to the indie-ization of distribution, ambivalence doesn't last long.

As Zidane producer Joni Sighvattsson puts it, “Once we stop making the 35mm print, it goes satellite, and then it goes digital, and then it will be much easier to cross over from various ventures — even from the Net. It will be easier for nontraditional cinema to seep even more into the mainstream.”

So while it is often fashionable to talk about digital technology as “just a tool,” it was clear at Sundance that from an aesthetic, technical, entrepreneurial, and cultural standpoint that is the understatement of the year.

See digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/digital_sundance for podcasts, blog entries, and more in-depth technical stories.

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Animation@Sundance

This was also the year animation raised its Sundance profile. The festival opened with Chicago 10, Brett Morgen's documentary about the Chicago Seven that broke new ground both aesthetically and technically via a motion-capture/animation pipeline at Curious Pictures, New York. No doubt Sundance programmers chose the film for its subject matter and storytelling, but it also signaled a coming-of-age for digitally created content. Chicago 10 had the easy mixed-media vernacular of young popular culture, a choice made all the more interesting in light of its subject matter — counter culture of another generation. For more detail on Curious Pictures' pipeline, see digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/digital_sundance.

Two other filmmakers leveraged the remarkable power of modern animation techniques to articulate their stories with a surreal ambience — one painterly and lyrical, and one edgy and, well, strange. M Dot Strange says he made the mind-boggling We Are the Strange — his first feature — the way teenagers make Flash movies, patrolling the web forums for tips on the animation techniques that suited his freaky, epic plan. Stop-motion, greenscreen, rotoscoping, 2D, and a blend of 8-bit graphics and anime (“Str8nime”) literally collide on the screen with a virtuosity that would have been impossible not so long ago. As it is, it took three years, but it got done.

For Year of the Fish, David Kaplan put Synthetik Software's unique (and affordable) rotoscope product Studio Artist to work on live-action imagery shot with a Sony PD-170 MiniDV camera. In his case, six months was enough to rotoscope and render the entire movie at home on four G5s — another workflow plan that wouldn't have made it even last year. For an audio podcast with David Kaplan describing the process of making Year of the Fish, go to digitalcontentproducer.com/podcasts.

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Podcasts @ Sundance

By Darroch Greer

In late January, three films showed up at Sundance that, for various reasons, had to be shot — at least partially — in digital formats. Each film had extraordinary demands to be met, and with each one, digital technologies filled the bill — although, in one case, not without the requisite difficulties.

For Lynn Hershman-Leeson, a pioneering visual artist who has shot several films in 35mm, the need to shoot her quasi-documentary about a friend's arrest under the Patriot Act after the death of his wife had an immediacy that required her trusty MiniDV, a Panasonic AG-DVX100A. The digital format of Strange Culture fulfilled the clarion call she heard from Dennis Hopper all the way back in 1956. …

When faced with the task of creating Protagonist, a film based on the writings of fifth-century BCE playwright Euripides, Jessica Yu imagined stories of obsessive contemporary behavior, with oratory in Greek recited by a chorus of rod puppets, all tied together with animated sequences. With so many variables at play, digital technology was a must, even though tragedy struck in the form of workflow issues between the Panasonic Varicam and April Final Cut Pro. …

To hear these and other filmmakers elaborate on their films and workflow, listen to our podcasts at digitalcontentproducer.com/podcasts.

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© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.