Yesterday I touched upon some of the reasons the air has been let out of Sundance’s balloon this year. And ballooned it has, for a decade. Today walking Main Street’s uncrowded sidewalks, devoid of the usual hypesters and scenesters, I’m thinking that this year’s soft attendance is a gift. And a sign that the Festival might want to recalibrate.

When the Sundance Institute took over the Festival 25 years ago, American independent films were 16mm, low-budget, and all but locked out of the box office. While chances of theatrical success remain as remote today as ever—admittedly there have been giant strides for documentary, Michael Moore’s body of work for example, or those penguins—digital technology with its protean reach, low entry cost and endlessly rising quality has at least leveled the playing field as far as production goes. more

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

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

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

When I sit down with Adam Elliot and Melanie Coombs, director and producer of Sundance’s ingenious opening film Mary and Max, I want to talk about their cinematographer Gerald Thompson. Which is handy, because they do too. (Note the vignetting in the photo at right).

Much has been deservedly made of the film’s detailed claymation animation and of its dark, taboo-pushing story of two unlikely and lonely pen pals. Elliot had previously won an Academy Award (Harvie Krumpet) and found acclaim as a storyteller and animator, but for him something was missing cinematically. That something arrived in the unlikely form of motion control expert Thompson. Like Prometheus brought fire, Thompson brought camera moves. more

Carson Mell returns to Sundance for the third year in a row in the animated short category with his newest and most bizarrely titled work, Field Notes From Dimension X: Oasis. For a look at Chonto, Mell’s film from last year, see this 2008 Short Film Patrol entry.

McSweeney’s DVD magazine Wholphin featured his first Sundance entry, Bobby Bird: The Devil in Denim, and an interview with the filmmaker in their third issue. Now it looks as if the life story of Captain Fred T. Rogard, the protagonist of Field Notes From Dimension X, will be told in a series of animated films and also in Mell’s fiction. McSweeney’s February 2009 issue will contain the first of his short stories. more

Submissions for Sundance’s Short Film Program were up 10 percent from last year, comprising a record 96 short films from 5,632 submissions from both U.S. and international filmmakers. The diversity of the festival’s selections is readily apparent in a short film called Magnetic Movie that is as electrifying as it is educational.

Magnetic Movie performs one feat that is by no means a small one: It might just change the way you look at the world around you. more

“Laying the dead to rest has never been so much trouble.”

So goes the tagline to the newest animated short film from the British filmmaking team known as Smith & Foulkes. Entered at Sundance 2009 in the International Animated Shorts category, This Way Up is a dark but whimsical 8-minute romp about father and son caretakers whose dedication most certainly cannot be called into question. When a boulder flattens their hearse, the two deal with some pretty big physical and philosophical pitfalls to get a dead body into the ground where it belongs. more

Park City’s been overcast and gray since Day 1, but this morning a brilliant platinum light tore a hole in the endless cloud cover and ignited the overlooking Wasatch peaks, back-lighting a sparkly veil of glassy no-see-ums, tiny ice crystals too delicate to form flakes, that danced on wafts of air until they melted in my face.

Yes, I admit the night before I’d seen Academy-award nominee (Taxi to the Dark Side) Alex Gibney’s latest masterwork, Gonzo, the Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, but I deny any pharmaceutical inspiration, at least this early in the morning, as I stop before the Yarrow Hotel to marvel at this floaty, twinkly, sun-lit scrim. Inside the Yarrow a press screening of Morgan Spurlock’s latest saga-in-cheek, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, is almost underway, and I race into the theater to find a seat just as the lights fall.

Both docus, I’m happy to report, are polished to high theatrical sheen with eye-catching graphics, animated illustrations (the great Ralph Steadman in Gonzo), and well-crafted high-definition cinematography (D.P. Maryse Alberti in Gonzo). Both acquaint audiences with past and present avatars of U.S. politics: the tragic George McGovern, smarmy Richard Nixon, idealistic Jimmy Carter (Gonzo); the hubristic tag team of W. and Osama (Where in the World…). Both deserve and will likely obtain limited theatrical runs (though Sundance 2008 has been notably short of acquisitions so far). more

“Four score and seven years ago, to thine own self be true. I believe in rock n’ roll. I believe in getting high.”
- Cowman Kennedy’s infamous Gettysburg address

The Kansas City, Mo., art collective known as MK12 has been on quite a roll lately. The ingenious graphics that highlighted Will Ferrell’s routine life in Stranger Than Fiction were theirs, and Director Marc Forster utilized their animation talents again for the opening credits of his newest film, The Kite Runner. This year, Sundance spotlights their subversively fun short The History of America, which was one of 16 works chosen by New York magazine as the best online content of 2007.

A visually dynamic mix of rotoscoped live action shot against a greenscreen and the latest computer animation techniques, The History of America is not the typical sly condemnation of U.S. culture that its title might suggest, but more a hilarious celebration of distinctly American iconography. Were it not for the epic war between the cowboys (who reside in Las Vegas and work from the Cowboy Headquarters and Casino) the astronauts (who live in a space station on the moon), the U.S. may not be the great country that it is today.

This ambitious project has been about four years in the making. Before any animation processing was done, MK12 storyboarded. Then, they finished a live-action rough cut, complete with actors and set design, to see what they had. Even when the computer processing had begun, every part of the film was still hand-tweaked in some fashion. A startlingly orginal creation, it combines cutting edge slick graphic design with a worn-out third-generation print look. Read On and watch the entire film at Scene-Stealers.com