The Sundance Film Festival on iTunes and YouTube

It’s old news that the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val has gone cor­po­rate. Some still protest that fact.
Oth­ers accept it, see­ing it as an unavoid­able real­i­ty in an era when even our sports sta­di­ums bear cor­po­rate names. And yet still oth­ers choose to focus on the good that comes along with the bad. One upside to the cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion of Sun­dance is the slick media that the fes­ti­val orga­niz­ers have made freely avail­able on iTunes this year. Since the fes­ti­val start­ed on Jan­u­ary 18th, Sun­dance has released a series of video pod­casts on iTunes that fea­ture direc­tors and screen­writ­ers talk­ing can­did­ly about their new­ly released films. Most of these videos run 3–4 min­utes in dura­tion. How­ev­er there are a cou­ple offer­ings that last a good hour. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, you’ll want to have a nice broad­band con­nec­tion to make these down­loads fair­ly quick and pain­less, and, from there, you can either sync them to your iPod, or just watch them on your desk­top with iTunes (you can down­load iTunes for free here).

Sep­a­rate­ly, iTunes is also mak­ing avail­able for a small fee ($1.99 each) a total of 32 short films that have been pre­sent­ed at this year’s fes­ti­val. But, let us offer you this small tip: these videos can be streamed at no cost from the Sun­dance web site.

Final­ly, on to YouTube. The poster child of the Web 2.0 move­ment, YouTube has cre­at­ed a chan­nel ded­i­cat­ed to the Sun­dance fes­ti­val. And here vis­i­tors can find dai­ly video cov­er­age of the fes­ti­val, inter­views with film­mak­ers, and video blogs that cap­ture the fes­ti­val expe­ri­ence from the van­tage point of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers. To give you a feel for what you’ll find in the YouTube chan­nel, we’ve post­ed a sam­ple video, which fea­tures film­mak­er Arin Crum­ley review­ing (with some salty lan­guage, hence caveat emp­tor) the short films shown on Day 2 of the fes­ti­val: