Category: From the Labs

“I just hope we get to meet Ro-Ro,” Lyle Friedman, my writing partner, sleepily whispered on the van ride from Salt Lake City’s airport to the Sundance Resort. Ro-Ro, of course, being her pet name for beloved film icon/perfect person, Robert Redford. I, too, deeply wished that I would at least get to see him once in real life so I’d have something to immediately brag about on Facebook.

In my short career as a co-writer of pilot scripts, I have struggled to explain the importance of “not-writing” to the writing process. Especially to my writing partner and husband, Matt Berninger. He is somehow always writing when he writes, by which I mean (and he does too), typing out scenes.

Arriving at the Sundance Institute Documentary Edit & Story Lab as an advisor on my first day, fellow advisor and editor Kate Amend greeted me with a hearty, “Welcome to paradise.” She said it in a way that seemed to reference more than just the beautiful surroundings. I didn’t know exactly what she was alluding to, but I had heard this kind of thing many times before.

Amidst the dramatic drops and amber foliage of Utah’s natural offerings, the Sundance mountain stands proud, a modern day Mount Olympus where good things happen. It is here that the muses of contemporary storytelling orchestrate a transformative experience. Advisors, staff and peers—one more brilliant, generous and different than the other—are at your humble disposal over the course of those five days, both in mind and in space.

What is the future of story?” Kamal Sinclair, co-director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Story Lab, asks in her welcoming remarks. I came to the New Frontier Day Lab at the Allied Media Conference this year because I have this same question. What does my future as a filmmaker look like and how is the art of storytelling expanding and the technical craft changing?
Just like the cinematic leaps we’ve taken from black-and-white to color, to sound to film to digital and beyond, is the “communication architecture” in which we tell our stories about to take another leap that I need to prepare myself for? Artists are projecting moving images onto people’s retinas these days, and I’m still trying to figure out my 90-minute, three-act structured drama/comedy with sharpies, note cards, and double-sided tape on a big empty wall.

When we five playwrights came to Joan and George Hornig’s astonishing house on Flying Point Road in Long Island for the alumni writing studio, the spring was still groping around without much conviction. After our brutal New York winter, it was hard to believe that such a promised warmth and regeneration was even possible. But then it seemed just as unlikely that the five of us would be put up in such luxury and fed for a full week by our own private chef (oh, the food!) on grounds just a few minutes’ walk from a glistening beach.

Last week, Sundance Institute and the Knight Foundation held ShortsLab Miami, a free workshop dedicated to informing and supporting aspiring filmmakers in an open forum. In attendance were filmmakers Michael Almereyda, Sara Colangelo, and Kenny Riches, who participated in Q&A discussions moderated by Sundance short film programmer Mike Plante on topics such as the actor-director relationship, transitioning from shorts to feature films, finding financing and producers, and how to engage with and draw inspiration from your local arts community. Below, we’ve distilled the day down to include some of the most enlightening points overheard at ShortsLab Miami.

To paint the picture: it’s 9:28 a.m. on a Saturday in Miami.

The tone was set early on. Even before I set-off on my journey, Paul Federbush and Matthew Takata, the inimitable international director and manager of the Feature Film Program, respectively, emphasized that the Lab would not require any writing. “No writing?” I naively thought to myself, “Isn’t this a screenwriting workshop?”
“Be open to the process.

I’ve been encouraged by Oprah and Deepak Chopra via my mother to keep a journal. On the evening of my arrival at the Sundance Institute Episodic Story Lab, I wrote the following entry: “This evening was kind of rough and soul-crushing and made me feel like I have no place in this industry.”I was never good at summer camp, or college, or any of those supposedly fun, nurturing places that outcasts are expected to flourish in.

Sundance Institute recently hosted the second edition of the Music and Sound Design Lab for Documentary Film at Skywalker Sound. This unique residency brings together four emerging film music composers with four Documentary Film Program-supported filmmakers and world-class Skywalker sound designers to experiment and discover new possibilities for music and sound design in documentary film. Often over-looked or eschewed by documentary filmmakers in favor of an “intimate” approach to shooting and often constrained by tight budgets, music and sound took center stage at the lab.

Crystal Liu is currently a staff writer for ‘American Horror Story: Freak Show’ and was one of 10 fellows selected to participate in the inaugural Sundance Institute Episodic Story Lab last October.Imagine that all your life, you’ve been singing in the privacy of your own shower, just for the joy of it. Just ‘cause you felt the need to express yourself.