On Saturday I paid a visit to the production wing of the Sundance Institute Online, housed on the south end of Park Ave. in a century-old former miner’s hospital.

The festival’s daily newspaper has a home on the third floor of the same building, and the podcast department is in the basement. When I visited the second floor, a team of frazzled editors were putting the last touches on the interviews they’d shot the night before for the Live@Sundance video series.

The previous night, a team of Sundance videographers had shot three sequences between 10pm and midnight — it was the big U2 3D premiere. more

On Saturday at the Outerspace Cinema, I caught the session “Sharing a Vision,” moderated by Avid. Director/producer Doug Liman (Swingers, The Bourne Identity, and the upcoming Jumper) sat down with editor Saar Klein and spoke to an overflowing audience about “the importance of finding the right editor.” The two first collaborated on The Bourne Identity, when both were newcomers to the action genre. (Klein had previously worked in The Thin Red Line and Almost Famous.) They recently collaborated on the upcoming sci-fi flick Jumper, undertaking yet another foray into unknown territory: effects-heavy science fiction.

They described an interesting relationship. Apparently their first phone conversation charitably can be labeled “curt,” after Klein told Liman that he hated the original Bourne script past the first 15 pages. But soon, Liman came to respect Klein’s honesty and independence of vision as an editor. They both found themselves fighting the studio as they tried to avoid adding to the film action cliches such as loud scoring during action sequences.

On their collaborations, Liman said that Klein had become as involved as a screenwriter for the simple reason that he was always around during preproduction. By the same token, Klein describes Liman as a good editor - he always has his own Media Composer for every project (which, of course, allows Klein to tell Liman to find “that one shot he’s looking for” himself). more

An afternoon session at the New Frontier center brought together representatives from some of the biggest behind-the-scenes companies in the film industry to discuss “How to Talk to the Big Guys when You’re a Little Guy.” The Big Guys were Lorette Bayle of Kodak, David Hays of Efilm, Allan Tudzin of Fotokem, Steve-O of Deluxe Laboratories, and Ric Halpern of Panavision. The little guys, of course, were the audience members.

Halpern spoke at length about Panavision’s New Filmmaker Program, under which a budding filmmaker might be lucky enough to score a free rental of a 35mm camera for their project. (Napoleon Dynamite, for instance, might not have been possible without this grant.) more

I just caught up with Mike Seymour, executive producer and visual effects supervisor on I Love Sarah Jane, one of the shorts screening here at Sundance. (Read Eric Melin’s review here.) Seymour told us about his use of the Thomson Viper FilmStream camera on Sarah Jane, including his data-capture scheme, and a little bit about FX PhD, the online visual effects school he’s involved with, which helped postproduce the effects-heavy short. Click here for my interview with Mike Seymour live at the Filmmaker’s Lodge at Sundance.

A charming, moving low-tech antidote to all the high-tech developments I’ve been covering today: Brent Green is a self-taught filmmaker who lives in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, and animates by photographing hand-drawn cels (numbers visible) and stop-motion wood-carvings with his Nikon D70. He edits these stills in iMovie.

At the New Frontier center, he showed his films and hollered the narration like Conor Oberst exorcising demons. The band Califone accompanied Green, perfectly fitting the haunting, raw, fantastic imagery. This one is Green’s favorite; it was mine too.

He’ll be doing the same thing at New Frontier (basement of 333 Main St.) on Sunday and Monday at 6:30pm, so don’t miss your chance to see some spontaneous live energy mixed in with the usual programmed entertainment.

An interesting film project was the subject of a session on Creating a Low-Budget Film with High Production Value at the New Frontier center today. To create a horror/psychological thriller for under $250,000, Michael Phillips of Avid teamed up with Norm Hollyn, associate professor at the USC Film School and head of the editing track there.

The 89-minute feature, titled Jack in the Box, involved an 11-day shoot with a small crew. A single location, a creepy basement room where all the action happens, kept the budget manageable. As did a heavy dose of pre-planning. During the session, Phillips projected a chart that listed off all the video and audio formats that might ensue, such as a 1080p/23.976fps HDCAM-SR program master, and RGB 2K files on LTO tape in case a film version is needed. The chart listed postproduction processes that would affect the shooting, such as pan-and-scan for a 3:2 version. (The producers aren’t ready to say what cameras they used.) All this pre-planning on deliverables, Phillips said, would make it easier for a distributor to decide to pick up the project.

For editing, Phillips worked in Media Composer (big surprise there), in SD for the offline and in HD for the online, both on the HP 8400 workstation. more

Today at the New Frontier center at 333 Main St., entertainment technology strategy adviser Phil Lelyveld (formerly with Disney) moderated a panel with five very different filmmakers. Mark Randall, now of Adobe, is probably best known to our readers as the creator of Serious Magic DV Rack on-set monitoring software (now owned by Adobe, renamed OnLocation & bundled with many Adobe CS3 packages).

He’s also an independent filmmaker–he says that he created DV Rack for himself as a way to avoid renting an expensive 35lb. CRT monitor for shoots. Randall described a preproduction workflow on a recent project that sounds just as innovative as any Serious Magic software program. Essentially, he gets all the principal actors together, some of the crew, and goes through the script as a dry run with DV cameras. The lighting might be terrible, there might be stand-ins for some of the actors, but the goal is to get the pacing down. The DP can play with camera angles to help firm up the final shot list. “I’ve seen it build team sync,” Randall adds.

Alex Buono wrote and served as DP for a film that’s got possibly the strongest kiosk presence at this year’s festival: Bigger, Stronger, Faster, about the use of steroids and other performance enhancements in sports. more

Up Main Street a bit is the Microsoft House, which is devoted to various forms of home entertainment. They’ve got several “entertainment center” PCs from Toshiba (Qosmio G45) and HP (their HDX series) that are designed for optimal viewing of HD DVDs. There’s also an Xbox 360 showcase.

Upstairs and toward the back is a sophisticated home theater, where a Samsung SP-A800B projector, a $7,000 single-DLP model with 1920×1080 resolution, shows HD DVD content from a Toshiba HD A35 (third-generation) player.

I spoke with Kevin Collins, director of HD DVD evangelism at Microsoft, about why the company is at Sundance. Collins’ title explains quite a bit of it, and as the competing Blu-ray standard continues to make headway against its rival, HD DVD would seem to need all the push it can get. more

Things seem to be picking up slowly here on Friday morning at Sundance. The streets of Park City are nearly empty, and it’s eerily quiet under overcast skies. Things are starting to get rolling, however, here at the New York Lounge at 545 Main St.

A great place to grab a bagel and network, the lounge is sponsored by the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development (say that three times fast) with the aim of promoting New York as a film center. (Which it is already, of course: over 100,000 people in New York State are employed in the feature film/television industry, according to the NYSGOMPTD.) more