PARK CITY, Utah -- Up until last year, Sundance Film Festival attendees who hoped to see the future of filmmaking would hop on a bus and take a 20-minute ride to the Prospector Square Conference Center.
There, at the New Media and Technology Center, festival-goers could demo the latest cameras, projectors and editing systems. They'd often have the room very nearly to themselves.
But at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival -- which begins Thursday and runs through Jan. 28 -- new filmmaking technologies will take center stage. The New Media and Technology Center, now renamed the Sundance Digital Center, is relocating in a huge downtown space, right in the thick of Park City's action.
Organizers expect attendance to more than double, but the move of the Sundance Digital Center from its tiny satellite site to the new 10,000-square-foot Main Street building represents more than increased foot traffic. It also signals a shift in the attitude of the United States' biggest film festival toward new technologies.
Digital filmmaking, organizers say, is now central to the independent moviemaking scene; hiding it away in at a remote site is no longer appropriate.
"It's exciting that they moved the digital programs into town," said Jonathan Wells, festival and editorial director of the Res Media Group. "It seemed ghettoized where it was, rather than integrated. Those who went out there were already converts."
The Digital Center's mission is to reflect "a digital transformation that will forever affect the way films are created, distributed and experienced."
The upscaling and expansion of the Digital Center -- taken in combination with the wall-to-wall industry coverage and media glare found in Park City -- may lend credence to the idea that the digital filmmaking movement will revolutionize cinema.
"Sundance's increasing attention to digital filmmaking is really a stamp of approval," Wells said. "It gives recognition to this movement as viable and real. People from all of the [Hollywood] studios are in Park City, and they can suddenly see that digital filmmaking is something more than an amateur movement, something more than people running around with DV cameras."
The Digital Center's content itself may not be particularly revolutionary.
On tap are demos and presentations from companies including Sony, Digital Projection, Panavision, Avid and Zenith, as well as Internet companies Streamsearch, Enron Broadband, AT&T Broadband and Internetstudios. The Center will provide a mini trade show within a major film festival.
But unlike tech-oriented conferences, such as the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention, pitchmen at Sundance will be playing to general audiences, including the skiers and film buffs who comprise a good portion of the Sundance crowd.
Most of all, the new tech companies will target filmmakers and Hollywood executives who come to Park City in droves. The hope? That their latest filmmaking gadget will catch the eye of the next great director or hot-shot producer.
"We are here to help present each new generation of tools that might be considered by filmmakers," said Ian Calderon, Sundance's Director of Digital Initiatives. "We aren't evangelists for any particular technology. Instead we are in a position to create a platform for these new technologies, where filmmakers can experience them, accept them or reject them -- to use them as they see fit."
Calderon said the filmmakers have generally embraced new technologies. Sundance 2001 includes 30 works that will be projected digitally, a substantial increase from 2000. The rise to prominence of DV filmmaking, stunning as it is, is no surprise for Calderon, who remembers introducing video at the Sundance Institute's initial Filmmakers Lab in 1981.
"If you mentioned anything electronic to a filmmaker, they'd think 'video,' or they'd think 'television' and they'd know it was something they didn't want to incorporate in their process," Calderon says. "Today, our film community is very savvy about all things digital, and very receptive to experimenting with new technologies."
And, Calderon adds, the resulting explosion in DV filmmaking has not gone unnoticed by the Hollywood powers-that-be. That newfangled camera you demo at Sundance today could become the industry standard tomorrow.
"The studios recognize the new economics, the new paradigm, the new creative processes," he says. "If DV is faster and cheaper, and if the results look good, it will be embraced. Not since the advent of sound has the film industry faced such a transformation. And, oddly enough, it all started with independent filmmakers."
