Not too long ago, camcorder-toting amateur filmmakers only daydreamed of being in the movie business.
These days it seems like most of them actually are.
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Judging by the volume of entries to Resfest, the annual digital film festival that begins Thursday in San Francisco, experimental filmmaking is flourishing, largely a result of the more sophisticated recording and editing tools available to the general public. Resfest received more than 650 entries for this year's festival, nearly double the 350 that came in a year ago.
Jonathan Wells, the festival's director and one of the people responsible for whittling down the applicant pool, says the surge in interest has a lot to do with the success of a few recent films like The Celebration, a widely acclaimed Danish film made using a single Sony PC7 digital video camera.
This summer's The Blair Witch Project could also be a factor. The film, produced by amateurs on a shoestring budget, has gone on to rake in Hollywood-like returns.
Still, Wells says Resfest, now in its third year, is concentrating more on the experimental than the commercially viable.
"This is work that does not have to emulate what Hollywood has done for the past 100 years," Wells said.
Resfest begins Thursday with a series of "longform shorts," works averaging about 20 minutes. The category includes pieces like Plug, a combination animation and action film about a futuristic society where people live plugged into electronic dream machines, and Searching for Carrie Fisher, in which two filmmakers trace their efforts to deliver a 20-year-old infatuation letter to the Star Wars star.
Friday's lineup includes a collection of short films and cinema electronica, pieces with a strong music focus. Saturday, the last day of the festival, will feature a panel discussion on the future of digital filmmaking and a screening of feature-length works, including The Humiliated, a documentary from Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier that Wells considers a highlight.
After the San Francisco screenings, the film festival will tour Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
Wells says he's putting clips of most of the works on the Resfest Web site, but isn't planning to webcast the whole program.
"In the past, these films would rarely be seen outside of the filmmaker's computer screen," he said. "It's a real treat for the filmmakers to be in an audience of a thousand people and have their films shown really large."
