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Back in the day, circa 2000, whenever I got into a conversation with other filmmakers about what I was doing, I felt as if I was up on my soapbox, evangelizing spirit in tow, urging them to embrace the burgeoning new medium, web video. It just seemed so obvious to me. But my efforts to enlighten were in vain, which in many ways led me into a sort of self-imposed exile from the San Francisco film community I was so rooted in.
Here’s a few experts from a journal I kept during those formative years, 9/20/2000: “…These last few months have been a flurry of emotions: self-doubt, exhilaration, joy, sorrow. How much longer can I continue my chronicles? ...This is a revolutionary time in the world of filmmaking (independent that is). I believe I’m on the cusp and the rest must catch up.”
12/14/2000: “Week 23 of the valet chronicles…right now I feel as if I have no allies. I know this is a continuous thread in these entries, but it’s how I feel, isolated.”
Somehow I kept posting 3-4 minute episodes (one a week) of my first series, Valet Chronicles, and ended up with 37 in eight months. I also make short films for festivals, but I had never experienced this type of filmmaking, where within a week’s time you make a film, distribute it and get heartfelt feedback, via email, from all over the world. And now, eight years later, perhaps the soapbox isn’t necessary, but what is the state of original web video content? Have any of those filmmakers I was sermonizing to, whose work I know and love, taken that digital step into the new frontier? Are critics critiquing web video from a substantial place of insight? And, perhaps, most importantly, how is the content that is being offered shaping viewers’ tastes and expectations of what’s to come? |
At this year's much quieter, much warmer Sundance Film Festival, filmmakers Lynn Shelton, Ben Kasulke and Nat Sanders made a habit of closing out a number of bars with a celebratory “Humpdance.” It was always a needed moment of levity, considering that no joke, the last couple months of have been kind of a downer. The election got us all riled up into an hourly news-checking frenzy just in time for the media to scrutinize the knuckles of every Wall Street sucker punch. We residents of Bummer City needed at the festival a good laugh. To the rescue was the film made by these three celebrators, a film thats intelligence transcends the question that drives it: “Are you man enough to bone a dude?” 
This past Saturday afternoon filmmaker and prolific film blogger Sujewa Ekanayake and his novelist girlfriend Amanda Roy Haynes find themselves at the doorstep of my condominium.
