Sundance: At the Digital Media Center

Millimeter editor Cynthia Wisehart, pictured with HP's Molly Connolly and Avid's David Krall, takes a hands-on HP/Avid editing class, part of a joint initiative to offer optimized Avid editing solutions on the HP platform.

When Robert Redford took his turn around the Digital Media Center at
this year's Sundance, it seemed like more than a duty call. Earlier in
the festival, he had given a quite impassioned speech about his
frustrations as a young filmmaker and the potential he saw in digital
technology to help liberate today's aspiring directors from similar
studio-driven frustrations.

Certainly, the Digital Media Center has been part of Sundance for
some time, and there have often been related digital filmmaking panels.
In some years, they've been excellent, in other years less robust. This
year, the press office had little to offer a journalist on the Digital
Media Center, so without preamble I went to see for myself.

Ironically, the powerful connection between indie liberation and
technology is only just starting to gather steam at Sundance. This is
in part because the festival organizers have a growing understanding of
the relationship. But at the same time, some manufacturers have also
come to prioritize the Sundance filmmaking audience. None more than HP
who brought its high-profile CEO Carly Fiorino to give a sell-out
presentation with Ben Affleck. Though the program was ostensibly to
announce HP's support of Affleck's Project Greenlight for aspiring
filmmakers, Fiorino also brought a big-picture viewpoint with her and
echoed the vision she had laid out at the Consumer Electronics Show.
The idea that audiences and filmmakers can converge around the fire of
digital technology and tell stories to each other independent of major
studios and media carries wide cultural implications.

At Sundance, HP CEO Carly Fiorino and Ben Affleck announce Project Greenlight's third round of contests for aspiring filmmakers. For more see projectgreenlight.com.

I'm not so naïve as to imagine that somehow studios and their
marketing machines will cease to drive the industry any time soon (if
ever). I know how Blair Witch truly worked. However, I also hear
from a lot of aspiring filmmakers. After the youthful obsession with
compensation packages during the dotcom boom, I know a lot who are
making their movies for no salary and on their own credit cards. This
is a return to historical tradition with an important twist. Unlike
their ancestors who toiled in the days of costly film cameras and
hourly postproduction rates in swank facilities, today's budding
filmmaker (and experienced filmmaker) can control more of the creative
process--especially the postproduction process--for a tiny fraction of
its former cost. Of course, there is still the film-out and other major
expenses. But you can get a lot farther down the road without having to
ask anyone for anything.

This trend provided the undercurrent for the Digital Media Center,
which itself was literally underground at a shopping center on Main
Street. As a reporter, walking into the dim, science-fair like
ambience, I felt the urge to join a hands-on editing class that Avid
and HP were offering. I've done this kind of thing a few other times,
and it's usually kind of embarrassing. I flashback to a Maya training
session four years ago at Alias' former office in Santa Barbara. I did
OK for the first three mouse clicks, and then before long I was
hopelessly lost, a linear 2D thinker adrift in a 3D world. Certainly
I've been in front of dozens of Avid demos at NAB and spent dozens of
hours sitting alongside editors and assistant editors watching them do
everything from digitize in the 90s to output to DVD more recently. I
never once imagined I could drive.

An editing class for filmmakers at the Sundance Digital Media Center.

But, as it turned out, in the HP/Avid Xpress class I was probably in
the middle of the pack on my mechanical skills. That, more than
anything, seems a measure of how far technology has come. As the class
progressed I was keeping up, doing better even than the aspiring
filmmaker sitting next to me as we batch captured, and synched
timecode, and eventually cut a few scenes and synched audio. I kept
thinking about how word processors long ago changed my creative process
and freed me from to think and change my mind—vital activities
that are inhibited by laborious processes. If filmmakers were similarly
liberated by today's technology, it's a sure thing that the talented
among them would get better faster.

Of course I know from my work as a reporter how equipment features
and realtime capabilities have evolved; I probably know more than some
users. But here, first hand, I was getting a glimpse of what all that
evolution means to someone with a screenplay to film. I also know
enough about Avid--and more recently HP--to know that their equipment
is used in the very thinnest atmospheres at the high end of filmmaking.
So I was aware in a very real way of this whole "democratization" thing
that people talk about as high-end filmmaking tools become increasingly
affordable and accessible.

My own experience fits right in to this continuum. I once admired
the rocket ships that Avid and other manufacturers made for their sheer
ingenuity and ability to overcome technical obstacles. (An Avid
assistant editor once told me that he had no interest in filmmaking,
but boy did he love this technology). Even then I believed that
technology was more than a tool, that it influenced who made movies and
how those movies looked. But technology then didn't entirely belong to
artists unless they had the right finances and sensibilities. Now, if I
had any talent I could make a movie myself. So instead of thinking
about the amazing accomplishments of engineers, as I so often do, I
start to think about what kind of voices will join our cultural debate
and storytelling circles.

Maybe the pain that Robert Redford went through was part of making
him successful--or eloquent. Maybe all those business and technology
barriers weeded out the untalented and uncommitted. Or maybe it just
meant that filmmakers came from a certain pool of people who were
either talented, or perseverant, or lucky enough to get a shot.
Literally. Were those people inherently more worthy than today's much
larger group of aspirants? Were they better artists from their
particular struggles? And what will see as new technology breeds new
filmmaking culture and new stories? I know those questions come up all
the time in the Park City theaters during Sundance. For me, it seemed
an entirely appropriate line of speculation at the Digital Media
Center.

To learn more about the Project Greenlight contests for aspiring
filmmakers visit projectgreenlight.

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