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

Director Sean Ellis and DP Angus Hudson sit on either side of me at the Filmmaker Lodge—Hudson, smart and earnest, Ellis, savvy and charismatic, with an actors expressiveness; they seem an unlikely team until they start trading thoughts about The Broken.

“I’ve never been so proud of something I’ve shot,” Hudson is saying, and that’s an understatement for what the pair accomplished visually. The two previously collaborated on Ellis’ short Cashback produced through Ridley Scott’s company RSA. But they had a much bigger canvas to fill on The Broken and an ambition to do something that has never been easy: scary movie that’s more atmosphere than gore.

Of course if anyone at this festival knows how to manipulate an image for atmosphere it’s Ellis, one of the world’s foremost fashion photographers, known for images that take their glamour from an almost impossible fluency with light and muscular storytelling that is often described as cinematic. It strikes me as he talks about the darkroom techniques of dodging and burning, as his hands make the familiar, urgent motions–shaping the volatile mix of chemicals and time–that he thinks reflexively, like a cinematographer. He describes making movies like making photographs, with the emphasis on making. more

John Lyons knew director Boaz Yakin from years ago on Uptown Girls. “I was on vacation in Woodstock, Labor Day weekend,” Lyons recalls. He said, ‘I want my film in Sundance, can you start Tuesday?’”

Yakin was shooting in NY and when Lyons showed up day one there were hours of footage sitting in the production office that no one had seen. No assistant on the film. Lyons thought he’d start digitizing, but the sound recordist still had all the sound on his PD6. So Lyons started digitizing picture—there really was no time to wait. 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

Brad Anderson liked working with Spanish DP Xavi Gimenez on El Maquinista (The Machinist) and wanted to do it again. Transsiberian would be a very different project—all shot on a train set; they’d have to get movement (and the view out the windows of course) through lighting effects, good green screen and compositing. And very good notes.

“The logical feel for the movie was very fluid, raw and handheld—that’s practical on a train, but it also felt realistic,” Anderson says as he briefly recalls the shoot during a forced march of interviews and photo ops at the Hollywood Life Lounge. The film (starring Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, and the rest) had its premiere here Friday and he’s a little swamped as a result. more

Cinematographer Kris Kachikis has a few minutes before the Pats game. He’s here in Dramatic Competition with American Son which he shot for Neil Abramson during 20 days in bleakest Bakersfield.

This is Kachikis first feature (he’s a veteran commercial DP) and he laughs recalling that his whole “overspoiled, commercial crew” came along for the ride at $100 a day. Between a veteran camera crew and an experienced director, it sounds like a sane shoot—only one 12-hour day.

Kachikis shot 35mm Kodak Vision 2 5229, chosen in part by talking to Emmanuel Lubezki about the long 360 in Children of Men. “That stock carries a lot of detail into the highlights and we had a lot of daytime car interiors and no time or money to light,” Kachikis says. “I had to have detail outside the car windows while still exposing African American skin.” 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

Bobby Bukowski couldn’t say no to Prague and the chance to shoot the Bavarian forest (for The Crown of Vysehrad). But the opportunity came at a price. The DP wouldn’t be able to join his first-time director Dainel Barnz and colorist Doug Delaney in the color suite for Phoebe in Wonderland. This was a harrowing compromise for a DP; Bukowski had planned to be there and the film counts on color as a narrative point: it’s a story about a young girl living in two worlds—one real, one imagined. And that’s not all: Barnz had his heart set on autumn and the film was shot (with a lot of exteriors) in the full force of Queens summer. Autumn would come in the DI suite. And there had been no film dailies. more

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

I find Post Logic colorist Doug Delaney at 5pm, almost exactly 12 hours after he put the last flourish on Adventures of Power and pushed send on the print. He’s multi-tasking coffee and laundry; he’s had plenty of the one and run out of the other. Most of the people who work on the films here spend months if not years (even decades) of their lives on the projects. The DI colorist gets a few intense weeks in that special antechamber to reality where everyone shares the stressful truth: the movie will be finished, and soon. more