Stacy Peralta is walking up just as Angus Hudson—the DP on The Broken—is putting on his coat to leave. In one of those uniquely Sundance moments, Hudson lingers to tell Peralta that they met before, when Peralta was half of the legendary skateboard company Powell-Peralta and Hudson was a 14-year-old skate rat. On the Hobie team in London, Hudson is saying. Peralta remembers the team. “That was my first job as a cinematographer,” Hudson adds, “they strapped a POV camera on me,” and Peralta laughs. “Me too,” he says and turns to me, “A lot of filmmakers started out as skaters,” he says. “There’s a story in that.”

Peralta who made the popular Dogtown and Z-Boys about the 1970s Zephyr skating team and opened Sundance 2004 with the surfing documentary Riding Giants, is back with a documentary that takes on a parallel culture. Peralta has in the past documented the skate and surf culture he grew up in; he had nowhere near the easy access to the South Central LA world of Made in America.

“We shot in two locations, one was a secure location—a gas station in neutral territory, where everyone would be comfortable enough to talk,” he says. Those sequences were shot with a Varicam, while the second unit shot with an inconspicuous Panasonic DVX100 in the field—DP Tony Hardman, a sound person, a still photographer, a PA and Peralta. “Every neighborhood has what’s called a ‘shot caller’, a kingpin,” Peralta says. “We’d meet that character, establish a relationship, and he’d put the word out to let us work. We had to do this neighborhood after neighborhood, because it’s so Balkanized, each with their own history, own mythology.” more

Reality sets in, this last day of Sundance, as 50,000 attendees move on to greener pastures and the glistening snow-covered peaks encircling Park City once again seem a part of the natural landscape instead of a fancy festival backdrop. Down below on Main Street, festival dreams and destinies have intersected. All that remains is for this year’s festival to fade to memory.

Riffing off Barry Levinson’s Robert DeNiro-starrer about a harried Hollywood producer which premiered out-of-competition (I quite liked it), The Hollywood Reporter captured the received take on this year’s festival with its headline, “Stunned ‘dance: What Just Happened?” more

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

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

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

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

Editor Monique Zavistovski was 8 months pregnant with her first child when she innocently agreed to cut Circus Rosaire. Director Robyn Bliley wasn’t a mother, so couldn’t have known just how optimistic Zavistovski’s commitment really was, or how central the Baby Chloe would become to post production. You’ll hear filmmakers talk about family—that’s how close things sometimes get making some films. But among filmmaker family stories, the making of Circus Rosaire, stands out. First, the documentary (screening at Slamdance) is about a family—the Circus Rosaire family, both human and animal. The director and DP Chad Wilson have been married for 10 years, in business together as the LA-based Progressive Productions for six.

Bliley had known the Rosaire family since she was 6 years old, so her five years of access to the family was an act of trust.

And then there was the edit. Bliley changing diapers in Zavistovski’s small apartment while the editor worked. When Zavistovski nursed Chloe, Bliley looked at cuts, or the three of them sat in front of the computer, Zavistovksi’s left hand around Chloe, right hand on the mouse. “Chloe didn’t sleep,” Bliley says, “she maybe napped a half hour a day—and that was my job, soothing her, begging her to sleep. She was so steeped in the sounds of the circus, the lions and tigers, the elephants, the monkeys, that those were some of her first words.” At a year old, Chloe sat rapt through the first screening, lulled by the familiar sounds of her own infancy. more

I overhear director Alex Rivera’s publicist telling him that my interview will probably focus on some technical aspects of the film. He seems to think he’s not the right person to address that topic. I’m thinking “ok not all directors are technical”’ Except it soon emerges as we talk that Alex cut Sleep Dealer himself on Final Cut Pro, built the animatic for the 400+ effects shots in After Effects and Photoshop, and even did a couple of final effects shots himself in AE (on his laptop). To him, that’s not technical. His fluency in editing and effects software is just how he gets the job done. No more technical than using Microsoft Word to write this post. 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

When I meet John Lyons in the Filmmaker Lodge, on Saturday Death in Love has only been finished for four days; when they went to do the audio mix the previous weekend, 8 seconds were missing from the middle of the reel. That got fixed, and the film premieres tomorrow. So as nail biters go it was a medium one.

Lyons is here with two premieres, Boaz Yakin’s Death in Love and his first feature as an editor, Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace starring Julianne Moore. He cut Savage Grace first on his Avid Xpress Pro and thought he could live with digitizing at 28:1. “But when I saw it I was pretty sure Tom wouldn’t be able to stand it,” Lyons says. Post Factory loaned him a PC (HP) Adrenaline and he redigitized at 14:1. Kalin also cut—he used the Adrenaline, while Lyons cut next to him in the same room on the Xpress Pro on a G4 laptop. “We each cut half than flipped them,” he says.

With Death in Love, Lyons digitized on an OS9 Meridian at the Post Factory facility in NY. “It had been in storage and they threw it up in the reception area. I would digitize there then take it home on a Firewire Drive.” He cut on the same Xpress Pro system until Yakin told him he only had 7 weeks. “I bumped up to a software-only Media Composer.” Cutting in Yakin’s pool house (glorified garden shed) in Silver Lake, the 24-bit audio started to crackle for lack of ram and Lyons had to spring for a new dual core G4 or risk his director’s sanity. more