Gray skies persist and the big awards show arrives tomorrow night as Sundance 2008 draws to a close. Yet there are still surprises.

Last year I pulled out all the stops and attended thirty films in a week, my Sundance personal best. I took quiet pride in my diligence. Yet I still managed to miss Little Miss Sunshine and many other buzz-worthy films. Do the math and you’ll see why. If Sundance programs 120 films and I managed to see 30, then I’ve missed 75% of Sundance’s best programming despite my best efforts. That’s why it’s often hard to have a conversation here about what everyone’s seen in common. Often we haven’t. more

Overcast again. Blues skies aren’t forever.

A slow day. Overheard a klatch of industry veterans planning a Walmart release of the DVD of a festival film, a well-regarded but talky interview-style doc. Can’t see how it could appeal to a mass-market crowd, Walmart’s or otherwise. Maybe it’s the thin atmosphere, the high altitude of Park City that causes Sundance’s storied reality dissociation. Over the years savvy buyers have learned to take a deep breath and count to ten (or ten days) before agreeing to a hype-inflated deal at Park City. Many have been burned in the past by acquisitions vibrant with Sundance buzz that sputter months later when introduced to the public. more

Park City’s weather continues its upswing, with optimistic blue skies, blinding daylight that makes snow banks dazzle like Hollywood teeth, and thin, icy mountain air that invigorates exposed skin and reveals your every breath.

No matter how good the films—and they are good this year–after being cooped up in the gloom of flickering shadows all day, a shot of cold air to the face is as bracing as a shot of strong spirits would be. Good thing, because the latter is a delicacy in Mondo Utah, where buying a round requires temporarily joining a club, usually for the duration of the imbibing.

Sundance is the ultimate temporary club membership, ten days of pretending that the world revolves around a resort festival of small films with limited commercial appeal. Where, absurdly, festival volunteers must shout, “Please turn off your Blackberries!” as the lights dim.

Not your Treos, your Motorolas, your iPhones… tellingly Blackberries are the official mobile communication tool of Hollywood, whose flying monkeys monitor Sundance premieres while compulsively stealing glances at their email in the dark—or is it the other way around? Do they really expect to find box office champions here? 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

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

The Creative Coalition is holed up in Park City shooting various types of celebrity-delivered messages to fuel the Hallmark Channel’s “Watch With Me” campaign that supports television programming events which provide family viewing opportunities. (See examples on the Hallmark Channel website) The Coalition is getting footage at two locations in town from 11:00am to 4:00pm on Jan 19th and 20th.

On the second floor of the Treasure Mountain Inn Marvin Dorson, senior vice president of creative services at the Hallmark Channel is supervising the promotional video shoots for the “Watch With Me” campaign–acquiring footage with a Panasonic Varicam fitted with a Fujinon 22×7.8 BERM lens all supported on Sachtler sticks. The head-on footage is captured at 30fps and will be edited post-Park City on an Avid with certain cut-in graphic elements, then outputted for various online, DVD, and possibly television uses. 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

So, as I hoofed it five blocks from one end of Park City’s Main Street to the other, various camera crews shooting various footage pieces for various networks websites, corporations, or syndicated news oultets sported the slew of professional and prosumer camcorders. In the normally 10-minute walk I saw 7 Panasonic HVX200s, 3 Sony Z1s, a handful of Sony XDCAMs, 1 itty-bitty Sony A1, 1 Canon XL-H1, and even a Red One Digital Cinema camera at the Slamdance HQ. In the SD category, 1 Panasonic DVX100b and 1 Canon XL2.

Also encountered along the path: Slamdance ‘08 Real Time star (the bearded) Randy Quaid, Danny Glover and accompanying insatiable crowd, Jack Black and accompanying insatiable crowd, Alan Rickman (Die Hard’s Hans Gruber) with shouting onlookers, a group of Obama ralliers, various turquoise jeweler storefronts, and a long line of anti-fur protesters.

The trek took me just over a half hour.

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.