Category: From the Labs

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.

Alex O’Flinn was the recipient of the 2014 Sally Menke Memorial Editing Fellowship. He most recently edited The Rider, which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. As part of his fellowship year, he worked with editor mentors Dylan Tichenor (Zero Dark Thirty), Stephen Mirrione (The Hunger Games), and Douglas Crise (Spring Breakers).

Sundance Institute held its annual Creative Producing Summit last weekend, a three-day gathering at the Sundance Resort that provides a forum for top industry professionals, producers, and directors to focus on three primary avenues of dialogue: narrative producing, documentary producing, and the state of the independent film industry. Below, Sundance Institute #ArtistServices staffer Missy Laney shares her takeaways from the weekend.At the start of the Creative Producing Summit, Festival director John Cooper posed a simple question to the group: “Looking back at the last five years, are you more or less optimistic about the industry?” With budgets shrinking, marketplaces becoming increasingly crowded, and projects becoming more ambitious, it could seem impossible to be able to survive as an independent producer.

In contemplating your favorite films of all time, chances are that most of the relevant works exhibit an exceptional—or at least serviceable—film score. At the same time, many of us would be hard-pressed to allude to a favorite score without first mentioning our predilection for the film itself. If that’s you, think of this list as a handy resource for the film-score illiterate.

“It’s gonna be our Apocalypse Now, where we disappear into the forest for weeks and lose our minds and discover who we are as men,” say Daniels, the lone directing duo at this year’s Sundance Institute Directors Lab, where they’re joined by seven other nascent writer-directors and their projects. But Daniels (never to be preceded by “the,” they assure me), made up of longtime music video collaborators Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, have developed a symbiosis that renders them more operative together than apart. And while yes, it’s a testament to Aristotle’s “sum of its parts” philosophy, it has also yielded dividends in the form of countless industry accolades, from their Grammy nomination for Foster the People’s “Houdini” to countless Vimeo Staff Picks.

Last month, the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program kicked off its annual fellowship with a rigorous four-day workshop on the homelands of the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico. In May, we chatted with Native Hawaiian filmmaker Christopher Kahunahana (Karaoke Kings) and Carmen Tsabetsaye (Puebloan in Praha) about their respective projects and their orientations as Native and Indigenous artists. Now we round out our coverage by exploring two disparate stories from fellows Daniel Flores and Missy Whiteman, both of which straddle issues of gender identity, depression, and the challenges of reclaiming Native American storytelling.

Last week the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program kicked of its annual fellowship with an intensive four-day workshop on the homelands of the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico. In our second encounter with this year’s fellows, we chatted with filmmaker Carmen Tsabetsaye (Zuni/Zia Pueblo) about the therapeutic possibilities in filmmaking, how tragedy has informed her project Puebloan in Praha, and the international misconceptions about native cultures in America. Can you offer a brief description of your project and your personal connection to—or why you’re compelled to tell—this story?My project is Puebloan in Praha, and it is the story or a young pueblo girl who moves to Prague after the death of her brother.

Last week, the Sundance Institute Native American and Indigenous Program kicked off its annual fellowship with a four-day workshop on the homelands of the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico. On the heels of his rigorous week at the Native Lab, Native Hawaiian filmmaker Christopher Kahunahana opened up about his creative impulses and how he’s arrived at his current project, Karaoke Kings, a singular story oriented around the homeless community in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Can you offer a brief description of your project and your personal connection to—or why you’re compelled to tell—this story?During the past 10 years that I’ve worked in Chinatown I’ve seen the homeless population grow immensely.

Every year, in collaboration with our hard-working partners and amazing hosts Mumbai Mantra (Mahindra), we conduct a Screenwriters Lab in India that supports eight emerging independent voices in Indian cinema. The following post comes from screenwriting fellow Dylan Mohan Gray.
I thought that writing a few paragraphs about my experiences at the Sundance Institute | Mumbai Mantra Screenwriting Lab would be a piece of cake.