Sundance Online Adjusts "Focus"
All this talk of IP-TV and video blogging. It's time to look at the 2005 Sundance Film Festivals online presence. Ironically they've steered away from made for internet films, but are supposedly bringing a whole lot more of their content online.
From:
Wired News: Sundance Online Adjusts Focus
"The experience in Park City is at its brink. It's expensive, there are no tickets, it's a small town," he said. "And it's frustrating to find great stuff and have the only people see it be the 400 people in the theater in Park City.
"I don't think the online festival will take away from the Park City experience. But if it does, so be it. (Festival founder) Robert Redford thinks like this, too. The question will be, 'How can you take this thing that is Sundance to a less elite audience while continuing to celebrate the filmmakers?'"
Elite? Take away from the Park City experience?
Get Real!
The reality is the
2005 Sundance Film Festival web site has nothing to do with being available to a wider audience OR being elite. It is such a bloated flash application. It's impossible to get at any content and if you do the viewing experience is horrible. Tip to Sundance people. By you're own words, you're supposedly about film exposure not Flash design, fire your self infatuated Flash designers who don't seem to get it and get your film content out there in an open and accessible format!
This site is sorely out of date with the current level of interactivity people demand. And we're not talking superficial concepts of "multimedia" and interactivity of yesteryear. Screw the flying type. There is no downloading, no caching, no ranking, no search, no dissemination in the site, no meta information, no bookmarking, no rewinding, no fast forwarding, no bookmarking and certainly and ironically no way to blog or discuss any of the films in this site. Hell you don't even know how long the video you're watching is, 30 seconds or 30 minutes. Something they seem to have forgotten about in the credits and clip info. Note, I've neglected to mention that many of the films aren't even online yet leaving you clicking around blindly in a hit or miss fashion. I'm sure they'll slowly go online by the time the majority of people have visited their site and left not to return again.
A typical conversation if anyone bothers to discuss any of the films on this site is going to go something like this...
"Hey you should check out this film by Bryan Boyce on the sundance site?
You got a url?
Yeah, it's sundanceonlinefilmfestival.com/2005
Ummm.. Ok.
Then you've got to click on...
A yeah.
Then there's a link for....
Sorry I lost interest in this sort of thing in 1999
The only buzz this site is going to create for the films it pretends to be promoting is go buy a plane ticket or forget about it. For all their expensive Flash design and hype they would have been better off simply paying a single video blogger to cover the event. It's truly sad.
Chicago, IL
