Sundance: Stars, snow, and social cyborgs

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Film lovers don't, however, have to fight the crowds, glitterati, and record snowfall in Park City to get a taste of Sundance. Ten short films competing at the festival will stream on the festival's Web site for 24 hours after they premiere.

Also, building on a partnership established last year, 45 of the 83 short films screening--which range from comedies and dramas to nonfiction and animation works--will be available for purchase and download on three platforms: Apple's iTunes Movie Store, Xbox Live, and the Netflix member Web site. The films will cost $1.99 on iTunes and Xbox Live. Netflix is making them available to subscribers at no additional fee through its instant watching feature.

Based on the success of last year's download partnership with iTunes only, it seemed natural to expand the distribution platforms, said Todd Luoto, who coordinates the shorts program, which is sponsored by Adobe Systems. With more than half of the shorts filmmakers signed on, Luoto added that "we're excited" by the participation rate. "We didn't know what to expect."

And, of course, many of the feature-length films will be picked up for distribution, as was the case with last year's In the Shadow of the Moon and No End in Sight, and the previous year's An Inconvenient Truth.

Festival films on CNET News.com's radar screen this year, taking readers' techie interests into account, include U2 3D; Fields of Fuel, a documentary about a man with a "veggie van" and a plan to take on America's addiction to oil; Flow: For the Love of Water, a documentary confronting the reality of water as a dwindling resource; Downloading Nancy, a drama about an unhappy wife's online search for someone to put her out of her misery; Sleep Dealer, a drama set in a near-future, militarized world marked by closed borders, virtual labor, and a global digital network that joins minds and experiences; Be Kind Rewind, a drama about a man whose body becomes magnetized and erases every tape in his friend's video store, leaving the pair to remake the lost films; August, about an aggressive young dot-com entrepreneur struggling to stay afloat as the market falls in August 2001; and Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, the latest by Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me fame.

Several shorts worth noting include Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno, a series about the sex lives of bugs, insects, and other creatures; The Drift, an experimental short about the fallout of a 1960s space mission gone awry; and Gaszappers, a short animated offering about climate change in which a polar bear finds itself in a position to save its home. Gaszappers will be available for download after it premieres at 1 p.m. Friday.

[tdi1]

"Innovative" 3D technology

It is amazing to me that polarizing filter based 3D is still considered "leading edge"! My father developed and patented the technique many decades ago. We were making digital 3D video presentations in the 1980's using off the shelf systems from Stereographics corp.

While it's great to see the technology in use again, let's keep it real - this is OLD tech that people keep rediscovering every few years.

[BixPoku]

This is NOT a first ever

I saw my first ever 3D film at 1985. In (former) Soviet Union ordinary cinema at Riga (Latvia). I got my polaroid glasses and there was full-time romantic movie. Clean, colorful and as 3D as it could be.