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

Swedish writer/director Patrik Eklund recently cut a show reel for a local magician and ended up with four hours of footage of the hapless man and—more importantly—an idea for a new short film. The result is Instead of Abracadabra, a very funny and sweet 22-minute short about a twentysomething slacker who lives with his parents and dreams of being a magician.

The trick up Eklund’s sleeve is recognizing that very important moment of suspense right before the magician plunges the sword into the box containing his volunteer. If a magician is truly awful, that person in the box really should be scared for their life. Since Tomas (Simon Berger) has already sent his mother to the hospital doing the same trick, the audience now knows that anything can happen. 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

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

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

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

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig, who comes out of the European cinema verite movement known as Dogme95, has moved on to direct her biggest dramatic film yet with An Education—a coming of age story about a young girl set in London which makes its debut this year at Sundance in the World Dramatic competition. Scherfig spoke with Millimeter Senior Editor Michael Goldman about filming the piece and her growth as a filmmaker.

CLICK HERE for that conversation. (Right Click, Save As to download)

*Photo credit Kerry Brown

A socially awkward woman seeks therapy in Countertransference, a short film directed by playwright Madeleine Olnek that might be a second cousin to Acting for the Camera, another Sundance short I profiled earlier on this blog. In Acting, it is the teacher who takes advantage of his vulnerable student, whereas Countertransference explores the idea that a therapist could do the same thing and abuse the trust of a patient.

Olnek’s soberly funny short (her second at Sundance in three years) is populated by other veterans of the New York stage, including Deb Margolin, Susan Ziegler, and Rae C. Wright. Their extensive experience helped to give Olnek the confidence to let the actresses improvise all of their scenes based on some very objective-driven outlines. more

Acting for the Camera is a scary and funny indictment of a person that many theater students know too well—the overzealous acting teacher. Whether the instructor is trying to get personal frustrations out or is simply on a nonstop powertrip, most acting students will admit that the seemingly arbitrary rules set forth in a bad acting class would get most employees at any other job fired for emotional or sexual harassment.

That’s part of what makes director Justin Nowell’s 2009 Sundance short so frightening. One can assume that he and his brother, writer Thomas Nowell, have been through their fair share of these moments. The 14-minute short film, shot on HD Cam, takes place in one room in a beginner-level drama workshop and was shot in one single day. more