OCR Text |
Show Page B2 Thursday, January 13, 1983 Park City News " : : Workshops ponder film issues Stein Eriksen cordially invites you to visit Bjornstova our new fashion boutique located in the new Stein Eriksen Lodge Silver Lake Village, Deer Valley Even the CENTER STAGE IN PARK CITY I Distinctive Victorian styling in 2 to 4 bedroom condominiums. Starring location in historic old town between . HI Deer Valley and Park City resorts. I For purchase or rental information call 801-649-2341. MOTHEMLODE 1 CONUOMIMUMS p i , A Development of the MacQuoid Company. . Located at 620 Park Ave. - Across from Kimball Art Center WELCOME! all participants of the U. S. Film and Video Festival For your convenience we are also located at the Park City Resort with ski rentals, ski storage, ski clothing and ski accessories. smallest ads are read. This year's workshop format for-mat has been slightly altered to make it more coherent and better allied to the film and video components of the festival. To this end, the program each day will address a specific topic. The days and topics are as follows: The Tuesday, January 18, workshop is entitled HARD CASH, focusing on the business busi-ness aspects of independent production. The program brings together experts in film and television, financing, financ-ing, budgeting and entertain-ment entertain-ment law-accounting. Speakers have extensive experience in independent production. Sessions will be broken down into four topics including: Session I, Financing the Independent Production: Protecting the Producer. Speakers will explain the financing situation as it exists today. Emphasis will be placed on sources of independent financing and financial management dur-' ing production. Session II is entitled, The Bottom Line: Deal Making in Today's Economy. Emphasis Em-phasis will be on controlling costs in specific, below-the-line categories, negotiating union contracts and waivers and setting up a workable production control system. Session III, entitled, Marketing Mar-keting the Independent Production: Pro-duction: From Concept to Release will be devoted to the marketing aspects of a feature film with emphasis on the planning responsibilities responsibili-ties of the producer. This session will include: identifying identi-fying the audience and appropriate market for a film; the elements involved in the design of the marketing market-ing plan and release pattern; and how to effectively work with distributors and exhibitors. exhibi-tors. Session IV of Tuesday's session is entitled Distribution Distribu-tion Agreements: Protecting the Producer in a Changing Marketplace. The speakers will concentrate on distribution distribu-tion agreements with independent inde-pendent distributors, studios, stu-dios, cable, pay television and other buyers in the market place. Speakers will include: Jane Alsobrook, Marketing Director, 20th Century Fox Classics; Joseph Horechek, partner, Mannatt, Phelps, Rothenberg, Lew and Tun-ney; Tun-ney; Lew Horowitz, President, Presi-dent, Horowitz Organization; Organiza-tion; Larry Jackson, Vice President, Acquisition, Sam I' Video artists John Sturgeon looks down time passages in his work "Spine Time." Sturgeon seeks balance between artist and viewer ,, by Rick Brough Contrary to popular impression, im-pression, abstract art doesn't give the artist a license to be vague. The artist must create images that mean something to him, and yet engage the imagination of the viewer. That is the challenge, according ac-cording to Park City video artist John Sturgeon. Sturgeon's work, "Spine Time," is honorable mention among the video pieces being shown at the U.S. Film and Video Festival, which runs in Park City Jan. 17-23. One of the central images in the film is a spine-like rod, as it weaves searchingly over the cracked desert earth or a steaming geyser. A man digging a hole uncovers a mirror that reflects his face. He smashes the mirror, which explodes (an effect achieved by putting put-ting dry ice under the mirror, Sturgeon said). The artist is shown reciting years in backward sequence, and the words overlap and echo. These are some of the visions that invite the viewer's participation, not just his digestion. As for Sturgeon himself, he said the piece has for him a theme of self-discovery leading to the edge of consciousness. u.fliNii.idWiii ii.'rtinijfll fft .hi SimAtii Jhj FilmVideo Festival Guide 3 uel Goldwyn Company; Howard Levy, C.P.A. Ernst and Whinney; David No-chimson, No-chimson, partner, Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp; and Jonathan Sanger, Independent Indepen-dent Producer whose credits include The Elephant Man and Francis. Richard W. deBlois of Ernst and Whinney, Whin-ney, and Michelle Satter of Sundance Institute have coordinated co-ordinated and will moderate this Tuesday's symposium series. The Wednesday, Jan. 19 workshop is entitled HARD KNOCKS. The morning session ses-sion will involve selected filmmakers, all of whom have a film playing in the festival. They will candidly discuss their films, with an emphasis on mistakes they've made along the way. Filmmakers included in this morning discussion include Fred Keller, director of The Eyes of the Amaryllis, David Burton Morris, director of Purple Haze, and others. This session will be moderated mod-erated by Sterling Van Wagenen and Jeff Dowd. The afternoon session on Wednesday, Jan. 19, will mark the beginning of a three-day seminar based on a film series entitled Americans Ameri-cans New Wave Film 1958-67. It deals with time as perceived by the self. "There is also connection between the spine and information-gathering," information-gathering," he said. At the same time, he shies away from detailed explanations. explana-tions. "What I just said is far more explicit than what I put in the tape. I'm not preaching preach-ing in the work. Otherwise I would just give a lecture." "Spine Time" uses computer-generated imagery, in "Vm not preaching in the work. Otherwise, I would just give a lecture. 99 John Sturgeon addition to location video shooting on the Utah desert and steam pools in Yellowstone Yellow-stone Park. For the Yellowstone shooting, shoot-ing, in the summer of 1981, Sturgeon rose every morning with camera director Aysha Quinn. "We would go out to the hot pools just as the sun was breaking, and shoot until the tourists started to arrive." For the scenes around the pools, he wore a lab-coat costume. "This was within a few jXulHiii,. , ijllliiiiiiMiJIIJrtl ftmfltiiiiiiilfffl The seminar and series, which are being organized by Melinda Ward of Walker Art Center and Bruce Jenkins Jen-kins of Media Study-Buffalo, will re-examine a crucial period of independent film activity. Wednesday afternoon's panel entitled REALITY AND FICTION will focus on a discussion of aesthetic, economic and ethical issues involved when a film combines com-bines documentary and fictional fic-tional elements. Panelists are Shirley Clarke, noted director and collaborative writer-film-video maker; Robert Young, director, whose works have bridged the gap between dramatic and documentary film, and Hollywood and the independent indepen-dent film; and western actor Kit Carson. This project was supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Sundance Institute. " Thursday, Jan. 20, the seminar program is entitled HARD CHOICES. The emphasis em-phasis on this day will be directed to the economic and aesthetic concerns of independent inde-pendent production: how to achieve a high aesthetic on a low budget. The morning session is entitled The Future of Electronic Film. The afternoon session is the second part of the American New Wave Film 1957-68 series and is entitled Visual Style. The emphasis will be on specific references to camera and editing techniques tech-niques and strategies. Panelists Panel-ists include: George Kuchar, a man well known for his tributes and parodies of Hollywood film styles, now a professor at The San Fran ," -', months after Mount St. Helens," recalled Sturgeon. And when the early-morning tourists came upon these people dressed in lab outfits, carrying heavy equipment, they would assume the two video artists were a pair of . seismologists. "The people would ask fairly sophisticated questions. ques-tions. They weren't dummies," dum-mies," said Sturgeon. "They would ask us if the area was stable. And we would assure them, yes it was." The video was shot in black and white, but Sturgeon Stur-geon layered digital color effects into the piece, through the help of computer technician Michael Lyon. The video would be fed into the computer sequentially, frame-by-frame. When the subject of the tape makes a movement in the sequence, a synthesizer is triggered to take three computer colors, lW i(Mftiiiiiiiiimiii HNIK'i jl;lj t f 1. 1 i I cisco Art Institute; Adoiphus Mekas, professor of Filmmaking Film-making at Bard College, New York; and Academy Award winning cinema-tographer, cinema-tographer, Haskell Wexler whose credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Bound for Glory, and Coming Home. Friday, Jan. 21, the seminar semi-nar program is entitled HARD WORK. The entire day will be devoted to the craft of acting. The morning session will see actor Martin Sheen conducting an actor's workshop. He will be using a double cast to walk through a pre-arranged script, using an ensemble of actors to demonstrate his pointsr-Director pointsr-Director Sydney Pollack is also scheduled to participate in the acting workshop. The afternoon session will mark the conclusion of the American New Wave Film 1957-68 series. It is entitled simply, Acting, and will focus on a discussion of film acting styles and techniques from both a director's and an actor's point of view. Panelists Panel-ists include: Shirley Clarke; Kit Carson; Taylor Mead, Obie award winner and comic actor; and director Robert Young. The final day of the seminar program will be Saturday, Jan. 22, and is entitled HARD HEADS. The morning session will focus on the future of film as it relates to independent production. The afternoon session will address similar issues as they relate to video. Panelists Pane-lists are unconfirmed as of this writing. They will give an overview of the festival seminars, and address pertinent per-tinent issues that have surfaced sur-faced over the week-long discussion. "He (red, green and blue) and "assign" them to the movement. move-ment. Sturgeon also used Lyon's computer to lay down digital voice tracks. Lyon was former head special technical techni-cal engineer at CBS, and now works as head engineer at the Telemation Company in Seattle. Sturgeon cut some 16 hours of video down to 20 minutes, and said he was aided considerably by Quinn, who not only acted as editing consultant, but camera director, di-rector, set director, and costume collaborator. The cutting, done in the last part of July 1982, eliminated some cherished footage. "The stuff was beautiful, but it was old thinking," he said. The abstract in his video is not hard and fast to begin with, he said. It's open to individual interpretation. It is, he said again, a fine line. "In his work, the artist should create so he's not just holding a dialogue with himself," he said. The artist should not make his themes too explicit, he added. That would be leading the viewer down the garden path. The goal, he said, is a synthesis a half-way meeting meet-ing between creator and viewer. |