SUMMARY: The Sundance Film Festival is both celebration and marketplace for those who love, create and deal in independent cinema, making it a touchstone for the health of the industry. While technology has made it cheaper and easier to make a film, it can be harder than ever to break through to audiences. Jeffrey Brown reports from Utah.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now, the changing world of making and distributing movies.
Jeffrey Brown was at the Sundance Film Festival this week. And here’s the second of two reports he filed from there, part of our ongoing series "NewsHour Goes to the Movies."
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): A world premiere at Sundance. Earlier this week, director Joe Swanberg got the red carpet treatment for his new film, “Digging for Fire.”
The 10-day gathering in the mountain resort town of Park City, Utah, is for those who make and those who love independent films, and it’s still a touchstone for the health of the industry. It’s a scene, all right, a place to see and be seen.
But for Swanberg and other filmmakers, it’s more than that.
JOE SWANBERG, Director: Sundance is a market.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
JOE SWANBERG: I mean, I am here to sell my movie.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.
JOE SWANBERG: I’m here to see other friends’ films. I’m here to appreciate good art, but I’m here to sell my movie. It’s a market.
JEFFREY BROWN: Just getting here with a film is a major achievement. For this year’s festival, there were more than 2,300 dramatic film and 1,800 documentaries submitted. From those, 184 were accepted.
A showing here is great. A launching from here is even better. That’s because, while technology has made it cheaper and easier than ever to make a film, it’s in some ways harder than ever to break through, to get people to see your film.
SUMMARY: What if watching a movie was more like being inside the movie? With virtual reality, your brain can be tricked into believing that you’re flying or in a different country -- a powerful creative tool for storytellers. Jeffrey Brown visits the Sundance Film Festival to witness how filmmakers are beginning to use the burgeoning technology.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): I am flying through San Francisco.
Yes, it’s true. I’m a bird soaring among the buildings of the city by the bay.
I crashed.
Well, I sure felt like I was flying. But I’m actually stretched out somewhat awkwardly on a contraption called Birdly. And I’m in Park City, Utah, at the Sundance Film Festival, where one of the main attractions this year is an exhibition called New Frontier, showcasing a new world filmmakers are now exploring, virtual reality.
Shari Frilot served as curator.
SHARI FRILOT, Curator, “New Frontier”: In terms of what’s coming out of the storytelling community, we’re really starting to see the first steps, the first baby steps of what is to come, but I do think it’s going to grow very big.
JEFFREY BROWN: One of the leaders is Chris Milk, who’s made a name for himself as a director of music videos that push the envelope of technological effects.
Here’s how he describes the virtual reality, or V.R. difference.
CHRIS MILK, Filmmaker/Founder, VRSE.com: We always are watching the visual stories, the moving picture stories that we watch through these frames. It’s always a frame, it’s always a rectangle, whether it be your television set or your computer screen or a movie screen.
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