RESFEST Wrap-Up

Here is the wrap-up I promised for RESFEST: Something I did this year that I didn't last year was the Studio Tour ( photo of the studio Honest ). Departing from the Tribeca Arts Center we took a tour of five Manhattan based studios. All different sizes and levels. Just a little view of the process of going from concept to finished product, ya know, in the big city. Throw in a little swag. Loves me that swag! Bus driven, check. A/C, check. No lunch, blech. For $75 a pop, you think they could spring for a pastrami sandwich over at Katz's. I walked over at the end of the tour from Rivington to help myself. I loves me some pastrami. Very cool overall to see how these studio operate. I have my own editing studio and was curious to see how the big boys do it.

I attended two short film programs, 1 and 3. What stood out from both? Flesh was the obvious attention grabber from the first program proving that art sometimes has to shock to grab your attention. It did. Images of planes flying into a pornographic Manhattan skyline screening only a few blocks from that actual reality four years prior almost to the day left some people taken back. Not speechless though. An audience member who had a brother lost in the falling of the towers spoke up and was outraged. I guess that's the price of art.

Shorts Program 3 consisted of the more surreal. The latest from Chris Cunningham called Rubber Johnny proved to be as disturbing on the big screen as the little. Another excellent short that I found just as unsettling was Le Régulateur, an animated piece about child adoption in the future.

On the tech side I checked out some of the latest and greatest from Panasonic and Canon. They both marched out their new cameras. The HVX-200 Panasonic's tapeless HD camera looked promising as did the XL-H1 from Canon. Observations of both cameras can be seen at zeroes and ones, my editorial blog.

All around good fun and a chance to see some cutting edge filmmaking. Check the tour schedule, there's a good chance it will be coming through to a city nearby.