Have you ever danced with the sun in the cold Utah snow?
25 January 2006 in Blog | Comments enabled

I know. Lame title. But its better than “Sundancing” or something like that. We are back from Sundance. And let me tell you. It is a lot of fun. I never thought I’d have that much fun.

I’m not going to give an itenerary or anything like that. You’ll have to wait for the podcast next week to hear about that. I just wanted to post and tell you guys my reaction to Sundance. First of all, Sundance is a great place to network. Being unknown filmmakers, we didn’t have the “all-access” passes that the big dogs had so we had to wait in lines to get into films. Some shows we waited for three hours… and didn’t get into the films. But, while waiting in line we met a lot of people and expanded our network. We were able to pass out copies of our business cards as well as DVDs of Replacing George. Whoo hoo. One DVD made it into the hands of an agent’s assistant at a major agency in LA. I know. It’s not a major deal but it could lead to something. You never know about those chance encounters.

One small note about the snow. Holy cow. It was like powder. You could dust it off. I’m so used to the snow melting onto your clothes here in Georgia and getting soaked. Awesome. Okay. Back to filmmaking.

The films in the shorts competition were interesting. Some were good. Some were terrible. Seeing what others are doing really got us excited because we feel we can compete on that level. It’s always good to check out the competition and then honestly assess how you stand up. If we have a film ready by next year, I think we will submit to Sundance.

Josh and I found that most people we talked to are really interested in this whole podcast thing. We’re developing several show ideas and looking for advertising to fund them. This is a very new idea and we were shocked that most people had never thought of it. This really made us stand out from the crowd while mingling out at Sundance. I really think that’s key. There are thousands of people, maybe millions, making shorts films and independent features every year. It’s really hard to stand out in that kind of crowd with just another short film. With the emerging podcast market and video-on-demand stuff, we’re trying to use it to help us stand out, the way Disney stood out when he made sound cartoons.

So that’s it from me. Josh will be posting soon with his reactions. Though I’m sure it will be much more polished. We have a saying. I’m the one that will sit down and “crap” out my thoughts on the page and Josh comes along and cleans it up. That’s actually kind of gross.

Jeremiah