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

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 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

Today at the New Frontier center at 333 Main St., entertainment technology strategy adviser Phil Lelyveld (formerly with Disney) moderated a panel with five very different filmmakers. Mark Randall, now of Adobe, is probably best known to our readers as the creator of Serious Magic DV Rack on-set monitoring software (now owned by Adobe, renamed OnLocation & bundled with many Adobe CS3 packages).

He’s also an independent filmmaker–he says that he created DV Rack for himself as a way to avoid renting an expensive 35lb. CRT monitor for shoots. Randall described a preproduction workflow on a recent project that sounds just as innovative as any Serious Magic software program. Essentially, he gets all the principal actors together, some of the crew, and goes through the script as a dry run with DV cameras. The lighting might be terrible, there might be stand-ins for some of the actors, but the goal is to get the pacing down. The DP can play with camera angles to help firm up the final shot list. “I’ve seen it build team sync,” Randall adds.

Alex Buono wrote and served as DP for a film that’s got possibly the strongest kiosk presence at this year’s festival: Bigger, Stronger, Faster, about the use of steroids and other performance enhancements in sports. more

Up Main Street a bit is the Microsoft House, which is devoted to various forms of home entertainment. They’ve got several “entertainment center” PCs from Toshiba (Qosmio G45) and HP (their HDX series) that are designed for optimal viewing of HD DVDs. There’s also an Xbox 360 showcase.

Upstairs and toward the back is a sophisticated home theater, where a Samsung SP-A800B projector, a $7,000 single-DLP model with 1920×1080 resolution, shows HD DVD content from a Toshiba HD A35 (third-generation) player.

I spoke with Kevin Collins, director of HD DVD evangelism at Microsoft, about why the company is at Sundance. Collins’ title explains quite a bit of it, and as the competing Blu-ray standard continues to make headway against its rival, HD DVD would seem to need all the push it can get. more

Avid’s senior product manager Matt Feury always gives me the impression that technology can never move fast enough. He’s thinking about solving all the problems and fulfilling all the wishlists out there. I can imagine him thinking that he’s trying to lay down track before the artists run out of rail.

So he said one thing at Sundance that really stuck with me. We were talking about what artists want–especially remote collaboration and easy movement of content. We’ve both seen that struggle play out over a very long time. more

Last year at Sundance, Adobe VP Jim Guerard was making the further case for Flash. At that time the installed base was enormous, but Guerard had something even bigger in mind. He described how the nonlinear potential for Flash was virtually untapped, that people still understood it as player rather than a whole new way to think about content and interactivity.

Since then, the Flash train has rushed forward, powered in part by its use on YouTube and other hugely popular sites. Overall there‘s no doubt that internet video has made significant gains since this time last year. But still, Flash still has more to offer if Guerard‘s ultimate concept is to be realized. Towards that end, Adobe is actively teaching Flash 8 to filmmakers here at New Frontier on Main (the can‘t-miss session is tomorrow–Wednesday–at 2pm when Flash developer Justin Everett-Church covers how to “Expand Filmmaking Options with interactive Flash Video,”). more

I met Satjiv Chahil (pictured at right with Sundance’s Ian Calderon), when he was at Apple (he founded the New Media division). At that time, he and his colleagues were talking about things that seemed a long way off–digital networks that allowed you to use desktop computers to make and move content, whether around a facility or to remote collaborators. At that time people could only just begin to envision that network extending to audiences–this was before digital cinema and before video sharing on the web. But the “what if,” was there even then. Now Chahil is SVP, Global Marketing, Personal Systems Group at HP. Now he and other Apple/HP colleagues like HP CTO Shane Robison are in the thick of that vision coming true.

“For people in technology it seems these things take much longer than we expect,” he says wryly, as we talk at New Frontier on Main, . Yet at the same time Chahil marvels that HP is now at the center of what gets called an ecosystem by many people these days. The word is awkward but evocative. more

HP is displaying their Digital Content Creation Workstations in the New Frontier on Main. Here is a collection of photos of the ongoings over the past couple of days.

You can also keep up with HP managers and their experiences at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in their Backstage at Sundance 2007 Blog. more