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MillimeterDigital Sundance: Redford, HP, and Democratizing Film
Feb 2, 2005 3:02 PM
Sundance Film Festival--“Suddenly technology began to emerge in a much faster, stronger force. About that time we got focused on what role Sundance was going to play in joining the technology.” Robert Redford is talking to the assembled at the festival, referring to the ability of digital technology and the Internet to liberate filmmakers from old constraints and open up distribution to a broader diversity of viewpoints and voices. “I think the new technology has some amazing advantages, and we’re very focused on that on how to work with it to the advantage of the audience and the filmmaker. That’s one of the beauties of the new technology--it’s created a more democratic principle …”
At Sundance 2003, HP CEO Carly Fiorina had acknowledged much of the same values in describing HP’s goals. “HP is all about the democratization of technology and the possibilities that technology creates,” she told audiences at a Project Greenlight event. “What HP technology does is provide access and opportunity to creators everywhere.”
Those visions of a digitally democratized world came together for filmmakers as never before at this year’s Sundance film festival. Just over 40 percent of the screened films were shot in part or in total on Sony HDCAM and it’s safe to say that 100 percent of them were digitally post-produced, including American Documentary Grand Jury winner Why We Fight, which was mastered on an Avid DS Nitris on an HP platform. Here, in this long-standing bastion of film, digital technology has earned its welcome and appears to be proliferating and co-existing with more traditional filmmaking tools such as, well, film itself.
Nothing says Digital Sundance quite like the effervescent presence of HP. A presenting sponsor of the festival and a major sponsor of the Sundance Institute, HP’s digital optimism was everywhere. Up and down Main Street and at the opening gala, teams of wandering HP digital photographers converted young hipsters and old hippies alike to the fun and immediacy of digital photography and instant digital prints. At the HP Experience on Main Street the masses could check email and check out technology, while famous and hoping-to-be famous actors were treated to a professional HP poster-making studio, complete with stylists. At wireless HP hot spots, bloggers filed breathless and streetwise accounts of the festival action, and the steady stream of IMs and emails flowed uninterrupted. For ten days, Park City was a digital village and a microcosm of an interconnected digital world encompassing content creator and consumer. Enjoyment--not just convenience--became a vivid theme, which says much about how far digital technology has come.
Even as the HP troubadours spread Carly Fiorina’s vision of a digital lifestyle, the serious business of liberating filmmakers was going on at the Sundance Digital Center. Anchored by HP and populated with HP partners including Avid and Adobe, as well as digital cinematography manufacturers including Sony and Panasonic, the Digital Center has become one of Sundance’s most popular non-screening venues, says Ian Calderon, director of Digital Initiatives for the Sundance Institute. It attracts about 1,800 people a day, ranging from aspiring neophyte filmmakers to Robert Redford himself.
“Sundance is all about access and discovery,” says Calderon, “and technology is another point of access and another avenue for discovery. Films are being made faster and more inexpensively than ever before thanks to technology, and that creates opportunities for our filmmakers. And not just filmmakers, but a larger community of creative people. Digital technology will be the canvas of the future, enabling new types of storytelling and an opportunity for all of the artistic disciplines to engage. There is no longer a digital divide.”
HP embraced that goal by being the first company to offer hands-on, entry-level tutorials in the Digital Center. This year the roster of tutorials expanded to include sessions with HP partners such as an Adobe seminar on desktop digital intermediate and an Avid/HP hands-on session with Norm Hollyn from USC School of Cinema-Television, as well as sessions with Sundance filmmakers who worked on Avid software and HP platforms. At the HP Filmmakers’ Studio artists considered options from the portable Studio to Go--an HP laptop-based editing studio--to economical Xpress Pro configurations to the powerful HP/Media Composer Adrenaline combination. As they did last year, HP also gave away a computer system to one lucky filmmaker--in this case, an HP xw8200 workstation.
As if to confirm Calderon’s statement about new and different voices, some of the many visitors to the HP booth included a standup comedian and a fiction writer--both of whom were ready to extend their art and see themselves as future filmmakers. Altogether, visitors ranged from the curious to the famous, all drawn by the potential to express themselves and reach an audience.
“For the professional, our goal is to build the highest quality tools that never limit their capabilities,” explains Molly Connolly, who is Worldwide DCC Segment Marketing Manager for HP’s Workstation Global Business Unit. She suggests that this limitless vision doesn’t stop with the professional but extends to an increasingly interactive audience. “Every person is a creator, everyone wants accessibility and fun, everyone wants to be connected effortlessly into a digital community.”
It’s that democracy thing again.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.