Category: From the Labs

Summer at Sundance Institute means one thing: lab season. Our labs are week-or-more-long intensive residency programs pairing budding artists with experienced mentors, all designed to help new voices hone their craft.
And the labs aren’t just on writing or directing (though we have those, too)—we have labs for everything from creative producing to composing music for film to working with VR and new media.

It can be an arduous, often inscrutable process to find and secure creative support. As part of Sundance Institute’s online learning community, Sundance Co//ab—and in an effort to demystify the application experience—Sundance Institute’s team of artist program
staff convened to talk about the myths, insights, and realities of applying for labs and grants.
These are the people who
know the ins and outs of the Sundance Institute labs and application process, as well as other means of artist support
within the organization.

When my editor and I first got word in May 2015 that we were headed to the mountains for Sundance Institute’s Documentary Edit and Story Lab, it was all very mysterious. “Don’t expect to edit much,” they said. Bring a jacket; leave your ego.

Adam Ashraf Elsayigh is a playwright, translator, producer, and independent scholar who splits his time between Cairo and New York. Adam has recently contributed to our creative communities at our Theatre Labs at both the Sundance Mountain Resort and MASS MoCA.The application for the 2020 Theatre Lab is now open and is available in English, French, and Arabic.

As the summer winds down, we’re spotlighting the Feature Film Program’s post-production support through the annual Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship and the Editing Residency, which took place this past June during our annual Directors Lab.
Honoring the memory of beloved Sundance Institute mentor Sally Menke (editor on Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Inglourious Basterds), the Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship supports an emerging narrative editor in advancing their craft and building their career.
2019 Fellow Mónica Salazar’s credits include Honey Boy (directed by Alma Har’el), which won the 2019 Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Award for vision and craft, and the Los Angeles Emmy Award–winning documentary Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano (directed by Ben Proudfoot).

From graceful piano notes to frenzied violins—what would a film be without a powerful score? Music is a vital part of both fiction and documentary filmmaking, and that’s why Sundance Institute’s Film Music Program empowers aspiring film composers through an annual Music and Sound Design Lab.
This year’s lab took place for two weeks in July at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California. Each composer was assigned either a fiction or documentary film project and then collaborated one-on-one with their project’s director to score a selection of scenes, with guidance from experienced advisors in both the film music and directing fields.

Getting dropped into a completely new project during post-production and being asked to reimagine structures and refocus on the director’s vision—all in one week—is a tall order. But the contributing editors who attended the Documentary Edit and Story Lab this summer are established documentary filmmakers with years of experience shaping stories, and each of them was carefully matched with a project that they could connect with on a deeper level.
Steph Ching—a DOC NYC “40 under 40” filmmaker based in Brooklyn whose past work includes After Spring and the Emmy-nominated Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon—was paired with Singing in the Wilderness.

Peshawn Bread is a Comanche filmmaker and a 2019 Native Filmmakers Lab fellow. Her short film project, The Daily Life of Mistress Red, is about a Native dominatrix for hire who whips apologies out of her white male clients.
When I arrived at the 2019 Native Filmmakers Lab, I was nervous to tell my peers that my story was about a Native dominatrix for hire.

What’s it like going through Sundance Institute’s signature summer labs? We caught up with a few of the 2019 Directors Lab fellows to get their quick takes on what it was like to fine-tune their projects with support from world-renowned creative advisors and fellow directors in the Utah mountains.
Joey Ally

Joey Ally works with actress Whitney Palmer on set. © 2019 Sundance Institute | Photo by Dan Campbell
Joey Ally stars in her musical, surrealist project The Hater as Dorothy, who gets fired for her liberal extremist views and retreats to her conservative Texas hometown, where she ends up going undercover as a Republican to run against her childhood bully for state congress.

Erica Tremblay is a documentary filmmaker and
activist who belongs to the Seneca-Cayuga Nation and is also of
Wyandotte heritage. Below she reflects on her experiences as a Native
Filmmakers Lab Fellow and an Indigenous woman filmmaker in the age of
#MeToo.Sgę́:nǫˀ.

The role of the film producer is often obscured by the far-reaching definitions of the job—which are expansive to say the least. With the Feature Film Creative Producing Lab and Fellowship currently accepting applications for the 2019 program, we checked in with 2016 Fellow Mallory Schwartz—and her project Before You Know It (formerly known as Stupid Happy)—to shed light on her journey of producing an independent film. Before You Know It was directed by Hannah Utt and stars Judith Light and Mandy Patinkin alongside co-writers Utt and Jen Tullock.

It’s an artistic process that often goes unheralded, and one that certainly warrants more conversation: the day-to-day work of the nonfiction producer. To coincide with the launch of the 2019 application for the Documentary Creative Producing Lab and Fellowship, we checked in with 2017 Fellow Diane Becker and her project Inventing Tomorrow, which is directed by Laura Nix and premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary “follows six young scientists from Indonesia, Hawaii, India and Mexico as they tackle some of the most complex environmental issues facing humanity today.