Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

Sundance 2005 Films
Announced

It’s out! The list of Sundance Competition Films has been released. You can find a PDF of films and short descriptions on the Sundance website. At the 2002 festival, the short film Ellie Parker screened. It starred Naomi Watts and Chevy Chase. It looks like the feature film version of Ellie Parker will screen at the 2005 festival. To the right is an image of Ms. Watts at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival for the screening of her film, We Don’t Live Here Anymore. Alec shot quite a bit of video from the last festival. Perhaps I’ll post it soon.

“A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.”
    David Mamet (1947 - )
    Brilliant Screenwriter & Playwright

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In spite of a horrible name, the Rasterbator is a pretty cool little service. They take your image file, blow it up and use page tiling to make it enormous! If you want to make a big impression on a limited budget, try the rasterbator! It is absolutely FREE! Simply send them your 1MB file and they send you a PDF that you print on your black-and-white or color printer. Assemble it and impress your friends. Alec made a garage-sized poster of his girlfriend. It was sweeeet. Thanks to Stephen Olmstead for the link!

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“Troubles are often the tools God fashions us for better things.”
    Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887)
    U.S. Abolitionist

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Monday, December 13, 2004:    
Kohl Glass will give a lecture in AC3S on Independent Film Production and the Festival Circuit. As many of you know, Kohl’s film, The Promethean has been selected for a number of film festivals and has won several awards (for the film and the actors). His new animated film, DerOstwind is nearing completion and will surely make the festival circuit again. Kohl has insights to share on short filmmaking, getting into festivals and what that means to your career. He’s also going to talk about feature film production. While at BYU, Kohl and Chris (his wife), worked on a number of independent features. The producer, director and editor of Napolean Dynamite were at BYU at the same time as Kohl. (He worked on the production of the “extra scene”.) He’ll share insights on their experiences as well. This talk is the bullet-point list of getting the job done!

Spring 2005:     We are currently in negotiations to get Travis Cline to come to MCC and give a Cinematography Workshop. Travis shoots on film and digital formats. He shot The Promethean, Pride & Prejudice and Avernus. We’re looking at a late February date. The workshop will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Watch the MCC Film Blog and CyndiGreening.Com for more information.

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“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
    U.S. Author

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Although Sundance doesn’t officially announce the screening schedule until the first week in December, Neil Gaiman’s site says that Mirrormask will be one of the featured selections for Sundance 2005.

With over twenty years as a professional writer, Neil Gaiman has been one of the top writers in modern comics. In 2004, Mirror Mask, Gaiman creates a story about a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers, who often wishes she could run off and join real life. The film will be directed by Dave McKean for the Jim Henson company and Columbia Tristar. The folks who attended Comicon (Ross, Kohl, Micah) seem most excited by this film!

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“Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.”
    Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)
    16th U.s. President

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If you’re doing a documentary or a low budget film, you may need stock footage (motion footage and/or stills). If you have an email program that imports vCards, you might find this vCard Stock Footage List helpful. Macintosh OSX users can simply import it into Address Book and query companies about needed footage. It’s a great resource (Thanks to Lindsey for databasing them for all of you!)

Be advised that footage for industrial or educational projects costs an average $25 - $35 per second. The average cost for a sample VHS tape is between $50 and $100.

Of course, some of my favorite footage sources are still Archive.Org and British Pathe. These vast archives have some FREE footage and low-cost items for the budget-conscious filmmaker. In Millimeter magazine (one of the BEST, BEST, BEST trade publications for dv production), I always see ads for Reel Cities. They advertise royalty free footage from a number of U.S. cities. If anyone has information on them, please comment below!

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“I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.”
    Ben Hecht (1893 - 1964)
    U.S. journalist, author, screenwriter

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences singled out an eclectic group of 12 films Wednesday as it narrowed down the field to be considered for nominations in its best documentary feature category. Among the Sundance Films that are documentary nominees:

Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me; Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s Born Into Brothels; Paola di Florio’s Home of the Brave; Jessica Yu’s In The Realms of the Unreal; and Stacy Peralta’s Riding Giants

Among the Sundance titles that have earned attention this year, but did not make the cut — either because they did not meet eligibility requirements or did not win over the committee — were Control Room; Tarnation (Tarnation too); and Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster.

I got the Chubby Ronald McDonald poster at SFF2004 and I just love the darn thing. So, I keep putting it on the blog. I also got a Jessica Wu poster with a drawing by Henry Darger at the festival. I love that Natalie Merchant had a song about him on her CD released six months prior. Funny how topics appear and disappear. I wonder when it will be Pauline’s time.

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While the Polar Express is doing well, it’s not as big as The Incredibles.   Jeryn , (age gave Incredibles a “9″ and Polar Express a “6.” According to a Comicon Review, this may be because audiences more readily accept cartoon characters’ anthropomorphism because the characters are clearly NOT human. The closer something tries to emulate a human (Tom Hanks’ characters), the more we notice that it is not.

Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori summed up in a simple, strangely elegant phrase about how humans respond to non-human entities like robots or stuffed toys or animated characters. That phrase translates into English as “the uncanny valley” — stated simply, if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human “look” . . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete. (Thanks Ross!)

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“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
    Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
    British Prime Minister

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I’m pleased to report that I spoke with Matt Mahurin today and he indicated that his 2004 Sundance Film I Like Killing Flies is going to be distributed by ThinkFilm! I’ve got to say that this may be my favorite new distributor!! The film, you may recall, is about Kenny Shopsin and his family restaurant in NYC.

Kenny is a West Village restaurateur, chef and philosopher, Kenny Shopsin. Shopsin’s is completely its owner’s creation; it began as a dry goods store on Bedford Street and Mr. Shopsin learned that the tiny location could make a little more money if he cooked there. Though the physical space never enlarged, the menu grew to more than 900 items, and the kitchen became a jury-rigged port for the man behind the stove.

They’re also distributing Born Into Brothels (another of my favorite films of SFF04). They also distributed Primer, Going Upriver and Spellbound. I hope I’ll get to meet these folks at Sundance 2005! (Yes, both Alec and I have passes!!)

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“In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.”
    Christopher Fry
    Time Magazine 20 Nov 50

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Last week I was talking with a fellow and he was saying that it was a waste of time to go to Film Festivals because the films just disappear and no one sees them. “What difference does Sundance really make?” he said. I told him that I thought a lot of films got distribution. So, today, I went through last year’s catalog to see what the money makers were. This summary is from Box Office Mojo’s Summary of the Top 150 Films of the year and a search for festival films by title. Suprisingly, a few films I really like never got picked up at all. And, a weird little horror film (SAW) did amazingly well and stayed completely under the radar!

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