Sundance Video Blog Number Something or Other

Academy Award Nominations, 2007

Documentary Feature:

Deliver Us From Evil
An Inconvenient Truth
Iraq in Fragments
Jesus Camp
My Country, My Country

Documentary (short subject):

The Blood of Yingzhou District
Recycled Life
Rehearsing a Dream
Two Hands

Sundance Rolls On

And on...

Sundance Video Blog Number 5

Number 5:

Sundance Video Blog Number 4

Part the fourth:

Sundance Statistics, 2007

Some Sundance Film Festival statistics:

films:
196 from 7,732 submitted (1 in 40, 2.5%)

documentary features:
42 from 1,362 submitted (1 in 32, 3.0%)

shorts:
71 from 4,445 submitted (1 in 62, 1.5%)

Even More Sundance Documentarians

Even more Sundancers speaking about their documentaries:

Jason Kohn talks about his film "Manda Bala."

Jessica Yu talks about her film "Protagonist."

Dan Sturman and Bill Guttentag talk about their film "Nanking."

More Sundance Documentarians

More Sundancers speaking about their documentaries:

Amir Bar-Lev talks about his film "My Kid Could Paint That."

Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine talk about their film "War Dance."

Charles Ferguson talks about his film "No End in Sight."

Daniel Karslake talks about his film "For the Bible Tells Me So."

Rory Kennedy talks about her film "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib."

Sundance Video Blog Number 3

Number 3:

Sundance Video Blog Number 2

I like this one. I hope they can keep this up....

Sundance Video Blog Number 1

Well, let's see how these go...

Sundance Starts

The Sundance Film Festival is starting and all indications are that it will be a huge year for documentary film.

This year there's a Sundance YouTube Channel, and profiles of directors with films in the U.S. Documentary Competition are already posted:

Irene Taylor Brodsky on her film "Hear and Now"

David Stenn on his film "Girl 27"

Marco Williams on his film "Banished"

Friday night the "Festival Dailies" start on Sundance Channel itself. All I need now is snow....

Saturday in the Chelsea Galleries

Yesterday I went to the Chelsea galleries.

Highlights: Henry Wessel at both Robert Mann and Charles Cowles. Also, of course, Elliott Erwitt at Edwynn Houk Gallery.

Lowlight: Tracey Moffat at Stux Gallery. Nice space, a photographer I have liked in the past, fun window display -- but in the end a laughably bad show that comes off as an undergraduate project propped up by a big budget.

And, yes, the branch of photography where a person stands before the camera with a surprisingly empty look on their face continues unabated. Any suggestions for ending this tradition are welcomed.

YouTube Update

For better or worse, the three videos I cut for New York Institute of Photography roll onward:

Project Redeye: Halloween Challenge has 1,279,259 views and is currently the 17th most-watched "arts and animation" video of all time on youtube.

Project Redeye: Holiday Challenge has 6,222 views.

About NYIP has 1,070 views.

I am not sure what lesson is to be learned from this. I'm considering whether it may make sense to create a youtube channel and post my own work there at some point.

It is, however, a "game" you win by getting frontpaged and getting a lot of views -- and if I'm thinking about that rather than other concerns, am I really making the best work possible? Also, having watched carefully the type of comments made on youtube.com, is it really a venue for the type of work I like?

Captain Obvious and The New York Times

I'm quoted in yesterday's New York Times. There's a column about online photography sites titled How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Now a Major Motionless Book by Alina Tugend, and in it I say something fairly straightforward:

This social aspect will be the next big leap in photography, Mr. Fisher predicted.

“A lot of people are right now pulling cameras out of their boxes that they got for the holidays,” he said. “They’re the wave of people right in the middle of the crowd. They’ve now accepted digital as a valuable thing. I think for many it will develop as their hobby or social interest as music once was — as their creative outlet.”

Of course, I've been saying that for 10 years, so I'm not actually late to the party....