It looks like an indie film fest is growing up. The quality is stronger, the variety is wider, and the audience is more enthused.
"We received triple the submissions this year: Last year was 87, this year it was over 300," says Jonathan Wells, director of the ResFest 1998 digital film festival. "Before it was just people making short films for fun. This year, with a film like The Cruise getting national recognition, that's just a sign of things to come."
ResFest opened in San Francisco on Thursday night, after stops in London and Los Angeles. The San Francisco event will run through Saturday, with films and panels covering the state of the expanding art. The festival will screen in New York on 16 and 17 October.
In the second year of its second incarnation (the festival was previously known as the Low Res Film Festival) ResFest is an increasingly high-profile link to digital filmmaking's grassroots. This year, organizers supplemented the tour with panels on digital filmmaking at the Sundance and Los Angeles independent film festivals.
San Francisco, the festival's home base, is also the biggest stop on the tour, and the packed house Thursday testified to the popularity of personal visions expressed in the digital films.
"I think it's a combination of San Francisco being a technology hotbed as well as an independent film mecca," says Wells.
What about LA? Wells says he's a little baffled by a less enthusiastic response in Los Angeles, and wonders if it had something to do with the lack of major stars (though The Rocking Horse Winner does feature Eric Stoltz). Big names don't seem to matter as much to audiences in San Francisco or New York, he says.
Matthew Nelson, a founder of the Organic Online advertising company, has attended all the previous festivals in San Francisco. Nelson said he was pleased with this year's format changes, which grouped films by length, and allowed for a higher number of longer films. "I don't believe they're married to the short length, and it's good to see them branch out."
Branching out in more ways than one: The ResFest group also publishes Res, a quarterly magazine that Wells hopes links filmmakers outside the festival's geographic range.
"I may never go to Ohio, the festival may never go to Ohio, but the magazine may reach someone there who's doing great work. The magazine's also out there as a year-round presence, instead of us just popping up every fall."
The festival and magazine have three full-time employees, based in San Francisco.
Thursday's program was a grouping of "longform shorts," five works that ran between 14 and 23 minutes. The content was diverse, including Naked Pavement, a documentary by Spencer Tunick, who makes large-scale photographs of public nudes; a grainy, home-movie-like treatment of a D.H. Lawrence story, The Rocking Horse Winner; and documentary footage that had been given a whimsical animated treatment, Roadhead.
Roadhead's director, Bob Sabiston, was on hand to answer questions from the audience, and to describe how he wrote the computer program that allowed his team to draw over frames of film. The program intelligently continued the drawing from scene to scene, which made easier the tedious business of rotoscoping, as the process is called.
Friday is given over to ResFest Shorts, 24 eclectic short films from around the world, and Cinema Electronica, some electronic music videos. Saturday's program includes a panel on digital filmmaking, and two feature-length films, The Cruise and The Last Broadcast.
The Cruise, a documentary of an eccentric New York tour-bus guide, is being fêted as the first digital film to get a national release in movie theaters. It is scheduled to come out this fall.
Wells says that successes like that confirm his faith in the format.
"There [are] all these analogies that people make between desktop publishing and digital films, like the garage-sale sign with 10 different fonts on it. With all those 300 films there were a lot that were just playing with [effects] filters, but we also got a lot of tremendous films, and the quality is definitely going up."
With higher quality, Wells says, comes increased industry scrutiny. The LA show had people from Fox and MTV in attendance, and Wells says they were excited about the new filmmakers. Wells says Roadhead director Sabiston has been approached to do a series and aspires to do a feature in the same animated format.
Though the films are made with the help of digital production tools, surprisingly few of them deal directly with technology. One that does is Web Dreamer, a two-and-a-half-minute film documenting Web workers (several from HotWired) at a computer conference, who have dreamt about the Web. Director Erik Adigard, a French expatriate who normally works as a designer, said his film is a sketch for a larger work he'd like to make, about his vision that Web-industry workers are living in a Metropolis-like underworld, never allowed to see what's above them.
"The premise is the concern that the Web is perceived as a big dream that is expected to deliver something of mythical proportions," said Adigard. "I started to get a sense that we are more in the middle of a maze than being on a freeway. It is like we're working on building a maze."
As far as the format goes, Adigard is pessimistic that low-cost digital tools will be able to get interesting works into the mainstream, which he believes is controlled by marketing groups and corporate momentum.
Mainstream or not, the crowd in San Francisco clearly enjoyed the films, despite the few technical glitches and sound problems. For fans of DIY culture, who gravitate to visions coming from somewhere other than the heart of big money, it's hard not to feel excited by ResFest's continued success.
