Press Release: Blur Studio Focuses on 2006 with Sundance Film Festival Entry GOPHER BROKE and Debut Feature Film Production

Acclaimed Animation Studio Continues To Grow In The New Year On Heels of Successful Academy Award Nominated Short Film And Several Feature Films in Development

In addition to commemorating the 10 year anniversary of Blur Studio (www.blur.com), 2006 also marks the year that the award-winning CG animation studio expands into the world of feature films, according to company President Tim Miller who just announced plans to develop its 2005 Academy-Award nominated short film Gopher Broke into a full length feature film.

The short, which has also been selected to be featured during the Animation Spotlight at this year‘s Sundance Film Festival, was most recently honored at the Animago Festival in Munich and the Imagina Awards in France. Written and directed by Jeff Fowler and Executive Produced by Miller, Gopher Broke is an endearing story about a hungry gopher who devises a scheme that he hopes will provide him with a tasty snack. more

The 2006 Sundance Film Festival marks the 25th anniversary of the industry changing Sundance Institute. Since its inception in 1980 by uber-star Robert Redford, the institute has committed itself to helping indie filmmakers succeed.

For a timeline of the Sundance Institute over the years, more

If you‘re intrigued about Cynthia‘s tracking what went down at the “Cinema on the Move” session (see Jan. 21), here‘s some other info that points up some of the serious development going into “video on the fly.”

Intel, Motorola, Nokia, Texas Instruments (TI), and Modeo (Crown Castle subsidiary) have formed the Mobile DTV Alliance, with the aim of developing Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld (DVB-H). By creating an industry-supported standard, the group hopes to speed the day when cell phone and portable media device users will be able to receive live TV programming anywhere a cell phone signal can go.

TI recently debuted its mobile TV chip codenamed “Hollywood.” It‘s a single-chip DTV solution that‘s being shipped to cellular manufacturers to begin putting in phones late this year.

It‘s interesting that cell phone video has gotten most of the attention. With TI and others providing powerful, low wattage chipsets able to receive video on the fly, it‘s much more likely that folks will want to watch it on something like the video iPod or other portable media device that offers a larger, higher res screen.

As a follow up on Trevor’s January 21 posting on Intel’s new Viiv platform (”Intel Digital Experience Zone”), I’m suggesting interested readers turn to John Furrier’s useful podcast interview with Raj Puran of Intel. Puran, interviewed at Intel’s Sundance headquarters, talks about the Viiv platform, Centrino Duo dual core laptops, and the dual core desktop Pentium D.

(Furrier’s podcast page has other interviews you might want to check out–see the right hand column–as he chats at Sundance with Adobe and HP reps.) (www.podtech.net/?p=289)

Intel announced its Viiv platform late last year, with the first, big roll out at the CES show earlier this month in Vegas.

I have to give credit to Intel on this one. Viiv looks to be more than just some tricked out scheme to sell CPUs. Instead, it’s a very big operation that represents a serious bit of repositioning on Intel’s part. They’re making a bet on their future that the real money is in the digitally desirous masses, not the increasingly steady state market of supplying commodity chips to the business world. more

Film Center 4pm. David Chai and his team from Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, bare their souls and their footage. Drop by and see how one of the key entries in the Animation Competition came into being.

Just want to mention to all of you out there in the Sundance screening theaters: Don‘t forget to give the cinematographers the benefit of the doubt. Some of these DPs are seeing their films for the first time here as the print rushes in from the lab or post house at the very end of the festival deadlines. They might have to live with mistakes, miscommunications and the fruits of other indie compromises. And as a huge fan of digital projection, I can say this: it is not perfect and like all computers, projectors sometimes get bollocks-up as my husband would say (not in mixed company). Settings can end up off–rarely, but it does happen. So in addition to the many other pressures that beset those behind the camera, sometimes things downstream come into play. Not making excuses here, just reminding you that as you judge the good and bad, don‘t forget to leave room for the unknown.

Mauricio Rubenstein is here with Puccini for Beginners, the first feature film shot with Sony XDCAM. (Standard def. XDCAM HD is here at Sundance but it‘s brand new and has not yet been used in the field).

Rubenstein is sharing his experiences with other filmmakers in a workshop today at the Film Center 2pm.

I talked to Rubenstein, so more about that in a moment. If you’re here and interested in speaking to him yourself, get on over to the Film Center.

Longish waits for Sundance shuttles (picture a handful of shivering strangers, huddled together at a bus stop in the dry, frigid Wasatch mountain air) and lengthy circuitous routes between far-flung Sundance screening sites provide for numerous accidental encounters that often remain in memory long after the Festival ends.

Yesterday on the shuttle I ran into New York producer Adi Ezroni, who’s in postproduction of three, count ‘em, films shot simultaneously in Cambodia about sexual exploitation of children, a growing problem worldwide. (I just shot a segment of another documentary in northwest Pakistan, in the earthquake zone, where I encountered the same scourge.) One of Adi‘s films is a dramatic feature, the second a documentary about the same problem in Cambodia, the third a making-of docu about how the first two productions were achieved in the first place. Is this the indie world‘s answer to Peter Jackson‘s shooting three “Lord of the Rings” at once?

Another Sundance crossroads is the New York Lounge at 608 Main Street, sponsored by the New York State Governor‘s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development and hosted by Governor‘s Office Director Pat Swinney Kaufman, whose husband is Lloyd, of Troma fame, the very embodiment of a die-hard New York City indie producer.

A key reason the New York Lounge brims with filmmakers: every day the Governor‘s Office FexEx‘s a fresh shipment of mini-bagels to Park City from Brooklyn. Reason enough to earn this location a gold star on my Sundance map. Did I mention the bagels are free? more

Director and screenwriter Laurie Collyer is in the Dramatic Competition with Sherrybaby. It’s just her second fictional film and she’s two for two at Sundance. The film was developed at the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and the Cinéfondation of the Cannes International Film Festival.

Collyer says the film was 5 years in the making and by the time she finally got her funding it was the wrong season of the year: summer. The lush palette of the season did suit the social realism or her story she says, or her vision, which was inspirted by neo-realist films. “I wanted to make a black and white film in color,” she explains.

So she and cinematographer Russell Fine (Naqoyqatsi) started capturing the too-rich summer colors and light, planning to deal with the issue in the DI. Collyer said she never doubted she would get the look she needed, acknowledging that colorists John Dowdell and Peter Headey made magic in collaboration with

Fine.

Tim Spitzer, Managing Director at Goldcrest Post Production started with already scanned HD D5 footage (normally Goldcrest would do the scans). The team did the editorial, some additional scans and went into DI on a Quantel eQ running Q color–the guts of Quantel’s new Pablo.

“As an independent filmmaker your choices of location and time of year are limited,” Collyer says. “The technolgoy we have now is such a blessing. The ability to make stylistic choices in post gives us incredible freedom.”

So…apparently the iTunes store sold 8 million videos at $1.99 apiece in 90 days at the end of last year.

Just came from a packed Digital Forum session at the Film Center–more than a 100 people, standing room only. All there to hear about “Cinema on the Move: New Mobile Technologies and the Next Wave of Filmmaking.” Like most conversation on this subject it was still quite general, but the subject has great momentum.

Forum moderator: Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Participants came from worlds of short film, mobile phone and internet. It’s clear all these worlds need to spend a lot more time in dialog. They don’t speak the same language.

Here’s who was on the dais: more