Film Center 4pm. David Chai and his team from Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, bare their souls and their footage. Drop by and see how one of the key entries in the Animation Competition came into being.

Just want to mention to all of you out there in the Sundance screening theaters: Don‘t forget to give the cinematographers the benefit of the doubt. Some of these DPs are seeing their films for the first time here as the print rushes in from the lab or post house at the very end of the festival deadlines. They might have to live with mistakes, miscommunications and the fruits of other indie compromises. And as a huge fan of digital projection, I can say this: it is not perfect and like all computers, projectors sometimes get bollocks-up as my husband would say (not in mixed company). Settings can end up off–rarely, but it does happen. So in addition to the many other pressures that beset those behind the camera, sometimes things downstream come into play. Not making excuses here, just reminding you that as you judge the good and bad, don‘t forget to leave room for the unknown.

Mauricio Rubenstein is here with Puccini for Beginners, the first feature film shot with Sony XDCAM. (Standard def. XDCAM HD is here at Sundance but it‘s brand new and has not yet been used in the field).

Rubenstein is sharing his experiences with other filmmakers in a workshop today at the Film Center 2pm.

I talked to Rubenstein, so more about that in a moment. If you’re here and interested in speaking to him yourself, get on over to the Film Center.

Longish waits for Sundance shuttles (picture a handful of shivering strangers, huddled together at a bus stop in the dry, frigid Wasatch mountain air) and lengthy circuitous routes between far-flung Sundance screening sites provide for numerous accidental encounters that often remain in memory long after the Festival ends.

Yesterday on the shuttle I ran into New York producer Adi Ezroni, who’s in postproduction of three, count ‘em, films shot simultaneously in Cambodia about sexual exploitation of children, a growing problem worldwide. (I just shot a segment of another documentary in northwest Pakistan, in the earthquake zone, where I encountered the same scourge.) One of Adi‘s films is a dramatic feature, the second a documentary about the same problem in Cambodia, the third a making-of docu about how the first two productions were achieved in the first place. Is this the indie world‘s answer to Peter Jackson‘s shooting three “Lord of the Rings” at once?

Another Sundance crossroads is the New York Lounge at 608 Main Street, sponsored by the New York State Governor‘s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development and hosted by Governor‘s Office Director Pat Swinney Kaufman, whose husband is Lloyd, of Troma fame, the very embodiment of a die-hard New York City indie producer.

A key reason the New York Lounge brims with filmmakers: every day the Governor‘s Office FexEx‘s a fresh shipment of mini-bagels to Park City from Brooklyn. Reason enough to earn this location a gold star on my Sundance map. Did I mention the bagels are free? more