Park City, UT-The jury and audience award-winners of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival were announced at the Festival‘s closing Awards Ceremony in Park City, Utah. The films receiving jury awards were selected by distinguished jurors from films screening in the Independent Film Competition and the World Cinema Competition. Awards were given to both dramatic and documentary films screening in the four competitive categories: Documentary Competition, Dramatic Competition, World Cinema Documentary Competition, and World Cinema Dramatic Competition. The films in these categories were also eligible for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival Audience Awards as selected by Film Festival audiences. The premier showcase for U.S. independent film, the Film Festival is an important new platform for international independent film and screens films that embody risk-taking, diversity, and aesthetic innovation. more

Back to the real world. We’ve enjoyed bringining you some of the technical details and process stories from this year’s Sundance. This is a great beat and there is so much more we could have done.

This festival is full of commitment and innovation from directors, cinematographers, editors, effects artists, colorists, technical directors, and product managers. I wish we could acknowledge every one of them, as well as all the video journalists who are here working with everything from HDV to HD.

Thanks for tuning in. Check back on Monday for the results of the judging.

Been trying to catch up with Laser Pacific’s Glenn Kimmel all week. Finally our cells aligned. Here’s the short version:

Laser did post on four of the films here and in the process had a chance to put their various DI pipelines through their paces.

For the premiere of The Nines–writer John August’s unique directorial debut–DP Nancy Schreiber shot three different stocks to support August’s three intersecting stories: 3 perf 35, 16mm, and HDV. Laser put their “indie DI” pipeline to work on this (an affordable HD DI) finishing to HDCAM.

Tamara Jenkins’ Fox Searchlight premiere got a full res DI; DP Mott Hupfel shot 35 and Laser finished to HDCAM. For director Nelson George, DP Uta Briesewitz, and HBO, Laser also did a full DI on the Super 16-shot Life Support. Life Support screened as HDCAM.

In Documentary competition, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman presented Laser with a pastiche of sources, including many archival. Nanking also finished through Laser’s full DI pipeline and finished to HDCAM.

This morning, Variety gave the Steve Buscemi/Sienna Miller vehicle Interview a good review, but incorrectly identified the shooting format as HD. That’s a compliment to the SD Sony XDCAM 510 (PAL) that DP Thomas Kist actually used to shoot the film. Actually he used three XDCAMs simultaneously, a technique he developed while working with the late Theo Van Gogh on the original version of the film. more

This morning, Variety gave the Steve Buscemi/Sienna Miller vehicle Interview a good review, but incorrectly identified the shooting format as HD. That’s a compliment to the SD Sony XDCAM 510 (PAL) that DP Thomas Kist actually used to shoot the film. Actually he used three XDCAMs simultaneously, a technique he developed while working with the late Theo Van Gogh on the original version of the film. more

Digital Content Producer’s and Millimeter’s coverage of past and present award nominees/winners

Park City, UT-A number of films that premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival were included in the list of Oscar nominations announced today by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“It is refreshing that the Academy is recognizing both the quality of the storytelling and the talent of the actors in independent films that originally premiered at the Sundance Film Festival,” said Geoffrey Gilmore, Director of the Sundance Film Festival. “We are also pleased that three of the five documentary films - An Inconvenient Truth, Iraq in Fragments and My Country My Country - premiered at the Festival and/or were supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund.” more

Avid’s senior product manager Matt Feury always gives me the impression that technology can never move fast enough. He’s thinking about solving all the problems and fulfilling all the wishlists out there. I can imagine him thinking that he’s trying to lay down track before the artists run out of rail.

So he said one thing at Sundance that really stuck with me. We were talking about what artists want–especially remote collaboration and easy movement of content. We’ve both seen that struggle play out over a very long time. more

Through Friday at New Frontier on Main, you can do two things: learn about storytelling from Norm Hollyn of the USC School of Cinematic Arts (reprising his popular sessions). And/or you can learn about tapeless workflow for XDCAM and P2.

Both run multiple times daily, so check the schedule at sundance.org/workshops or in personal at Workshop Area B in New Frontier.

noon: Rights Liscensing in the New Era of Distribution.

I’m just going to quote Sundance; “Internet platforms, video-on-demand, mobile devices and indie film pay-per-view are no longer a dream–they are the reality of the new world of distribution. But complexities abound, creating a need to make sense of revenue models, developing technologies, and evolving methods of exhibition. Hear major players, service providers and filmmakers tackle the issues that surround today’s liscensing/distribution opportunities. Moderated by Scott Kirsner of Variety.

It’s a start.

Sundance wasn‘t even a day old when The Sundance Channel bought Jennifer Fox‘s six-hour film Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. Shot all over the world across 8 years, the cinematography is a conversation among Fox and the women she meets along the way; they pass a Sony PDX10 back and forth as they circle around and through the subjects of life: survival, freedom, gratitude, loss, power and fear, diminishment and emergence. And gossip.

“Film is thin,” Fox suggests, “it doesn‘t allow you to do the width of human life or female conversations. This was a way to get to some of the thickness of female conversation. Passing the camera replicates the way we speak as women.” more