Stop-motion animation has been making a bit of a comeback recently. Despite the long hours it takes to put something together with this age-old animation technique, it can be a refreshing change of pace for viewers inundated with similar-looking computer animation and widespread CGI special effects.

Max Winston’s short film I Live in the Woods! is literally an eye-popping visual experience. It starts off with a feverish exclamation from a high-jumping, superpowered hillbilly about his love of the woods. It ends up being a hilariously violent and absurd romp that goes way beyond the forest and up to the heavens—not exactly what you’d expect from an animator who is currently working on a short film for Sesame Street. more

Many of the reviews of Thriller in Manila (which premiered in World Documentary Competition last Friday) mention the fact that it transcends expectations for a sports documentary (it revolves around the third Ali-Frazier right in Manila in 1975).

The credit for this of course goes to director John Dower, editor Nicholas Packer, DP Stephen Sanden and the team. But it also goes to Andrew MacKenzie, the producer at UK’s Channel 4 who provided the money. At least that’s how Dower explains it with a kind of wonder in his voice, as if still can’t believe he got to make a documentary with enough money. Money that bought a precious thing: pre-production.

Actually calling it pre-production doesn’t really describe it. Dower talks about going to the north Broad Street neighborhood in Philly, with no set plan, hanging out at Frazier’s boxing gym with the fragile, ferocious and mistrustful fighter. Dower walked the streets, met the now-gray-haired friends and witnesses, interviewed the fight participants including Ali’s acerbic doctor. He moved into the story. This is of course not unheard of in documentaries—but it is rarely budgeted for. more

Press Release

LIVEstyle Entertainment, the premier agency in North America for media-based event production and marketing, will once again take center stage during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. LIVEstyle Managing Partner Ryan Heil has teamed up with actor/DJ Danny Masterson and actor Chris Masterson to open Downstairs, the newest live event performance space on Main Street and the first celebrity-owned nightclub in the state of Utah. Located at 625 Main Street in Park City’s historic Old Town district, Downstairs will house LIVEstyle’s celebrated Film Lounge program sponsored by Stella Artois as well as the trailblazing Film Lounge Afterhours series sponsored by MySpace, Elite Model Management, Stella Artois, Vice Magazine, The Randolph at Broome, and Anywhere Road, beginning Friday, January 16th, through Friday, January 23rd. more

The Nature Between Us is in Sundance’s U.S. Dramatic Short category, but it’s the animated portion of the 5-minute film that takes it to a whole new level. Director William Campbell and his cohorts are part of a Los Angeles-based collective known as Team G Entertainment, and in cooperation with New York-based collective Superfad, Campbell has created a unique blend of highly stylized live-action and 3D computer animation that is masquerading as a lost VHS tape.

Looking like some sort of sick cross between In Living Color and Saved by the Bell, The Nature Between Us is colored in enough bright neon to make Speed Racer jealous. As the camera swings between cliques of graffiti artists, popular girls, and radical bike dudes, a laugh track underscores the artificialness of the “street scene� set around them. more

Somehow the tiny budget for Paper Heart paid for trips to Toronto, Paris, and about 12 states including—to the best of DP Jay Hunter’s recollection—California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee and New York, where the man shot 300 hours of Varicam footage in ten weeks. Not surprisingly he thinks Paper Heart’s lone editor Ryan Brown is a hero.

The film is in Dramatic Competition and premiered last night at the Racquet Club. Directed by Nicholas Jasenovec it tells a fictional story of Charlene Yi (the actress’/co-producer’s real name) through both a narrative thread and a documentary one. (The picture at right shows Jasenovec, Yi, and Brown). While Charlene’s story of skeptical love is fictional, her co-stars are not. Hunter says he shot the many interviews with non-actors—friends and acquaintances talking about love–in a narrative style using primes and very deliberate compositions, but that he also tried to shoot the narrative segments with the frankness of a documentary, “obeying the laws of reality.â€? more

John Hindman didn’t have to go the normal route of getting funding for his independent film before the acquiring the cast. Actor Jeff Daniels signed on to play the title charatcer, Arlen Faber, after reading Hindman’s script and before the money was even there. “If it weren’t for Jeff taking a chance on me–a nobody–I would just be a guy who wrote a screenplay,” he says.

Arlen Faber is the story of a reclusive writer who surfaces on the 20th anniversary his best-selling religious self-help book, and is competing in the dramatic competetion at Sundance this year. It also co-stars Lauren Graham, Olivia Thirlby, and Kat Dennings. more

Press Release

At the 25th Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah (January 15 – 25), several films are on the roster for filmmakers whose post production companies used ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH Digital Process Solution in their digital workflow, including a Grand Jury Nomination for feature film “Toe to Toe.� ASSIMILATE congratulates Filmworksfx (Santa Monica, CA), Hollywood DI (Hollywood, CA), Offhollywood (NYC), and Cinemotion (Sofia, Bulgaria) for the post production of film projects accepted by the Sundance Film Festival 2009, the premier showcase for independent American and international filmmakers. more

Reflections on a paranoid childhood manifest themselves in images of a one-eyed alien Jesus with an exposed brain, a possessed teenager whose neck turns 180 degrees and morphs into a goat’s head against a pentagram, and constant reappearances of hamburgers and skulls in From Burger It Came, an inventive animated short film from Dominic Bisignano.

Besides being selected in the 2009 Sundance Animated Shorts program, the movie also served as Bisignano’s final thesis film for his master’s degree in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. It combines hand-drawn animation with paintings and computer-generated imagery and shading to create a constantly changing canvas of surreal images. more

Press Release

Two films premiering at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Feature Film Competition, El General by Natalia Almada and William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe by Sarah and Emily Kunstler, will have their national broadcast premieres on the P.O.V. (“Point of View”) documentary series on PBS, it was announced by Simon Kilmurry, Executive Director, American Documentary | P.O.V. Sundance takes place Jan. 15-25, 2009 in Park City, Salt Lake City, Ogden and Sundance, Utah. more

Director Ryan Shiraki and I are patrolling the very gracious lobby of the Park City hotel looking for exactly what we found: two high backed Chesterfield-esque chairs in a quiet corner next to a high window near a tasteful fern. We settle in.

Shiraki is here (again) with Spring Breakdown, a “Girls Gone Wild” story with heart staring Amy Poehler, Parker Posey, and Rachel Dratch, who co-wrote with Shiraki.

Shiraki’s DP Frank DeMarco shot Hedwig and the Angry Inch a film Shiraki loved for its extravagant and pointed use of color—something he wanted for his own film. “I love the way that in certain scenes these isolated bright colors would pop out of the sea of gray and blue,� he says of DeMarco’s work on Hedwig. He explains that his movie deliberately kicks off with his three heroines singing a campy version of Cindy Lauper’s “True Colors� and that each has an hero color (Amy: yellow; Parker: red: Rachel: blue) that travels with them from morose to magnificent as they bust out with the college kids on Los Padres Island at Spring Break. more