New Media

What happened at AIVF over the last 30 years?

I first became aware of AIVF when Martha Gever was editor of The Independent. I marveled at this national organization that put out each month a magazine chock full of weighty, intellectual and critical articles on film and video.

For years, the holy grail of independent distribution was Miramax. Then mid-sized companies like ThinkFilm, Magnolia Pictures, and IFC Films emerged around the millennium, while mini-majors such as Sony Classics formed to compete with the Weinsteins. Meanwhile, smaller, mom-and-pop operations, trusted for their integrity—Kino, New Yorker, and Zietgeist—inhabited

“I don’t know how big of a historian you are,” begins David Dundas, one of the founders of YouAreTV, a video hosting site launched at the beginning of this year. “But this whole technology thing is kind of equivalent to when the printing press came out.”

I recognize Ryanne Hodson as soon as I enter the Lower East Side café—even though I’ve never met her before. After watching her video blogs, I feel as though I already know the pretty, engaging, 26-year-old artist, who is now at the forefront of a small but rapidly growing movement of video bloggers. “Vlogging” essentially consists of making short videos and, after compressing them to specific settings (to ensure, as vlogger Jan McLaughlin says, that they are “reliably seen without stuttering, buffering streams getting in the way”), posting them online.

At the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, Steve Savage and Susan Margolin, the two minds behind New Video, a New York-based entertainment marketing and sales company, watched as tickets for documentaries were snatched up left and right. They witnessed audiences line up to get into sold-out theaters. They saw documentary after documentary screen with standing room only.

Every time a new type of technology is developed in the entertainment industry, including in motion pictures, issues arise regarding whether use of that new technology was intended in the original agreement or license.

For years, digital cameras and post-production equipment have been changing the way films are budgeted, shot, and edited. But no matter how films are made today, theatergoers still watch them on 35 millimeter celluloid prints. Even when a film is shot on high-definition video, the distributor has to copy the master onto celluloid before sending it to a theater.

Freak boy and Festivus poles. Gutted tuna auctioned in Tokyo. And Thanos-the-PR-man singing “Feelings” at karaoke. Whoa-oh-oh.

Dear Doc Doctor:

In the post-production phase, technology becomes so complicated—there are so many options. Any suggestion on what’s the best format with which to master my film while still being affordable?