Ann Hornaday has a long overdue mainstream media piece on the aesthetic virtues of short-form web video in The Washington Post. It's a must read as she quite thoughtfully provides some words of wisdom -- "Your limitions are your strength," "You've made us laugh, you've made us link, now make us think" are two examples -- for aspiring web filmmakers. And, among her examples, Jamie Stuart's White Plastic Flower, his impressionistic reportage from this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Here's what she had to say about his podcast:

But a foreshortened, small-box format doesn't have to limit cinematographic ambition. In White Plastic Flower, a podcast diary about the Sundance Film Festival made for Filmmaker magazine, director Jamie Stuart manages to get an impressive depth of field into the frame, deftly shifting focus from close-ups to sweeping shots of the Wasatch Mountains. Its wonderfully diverse imagery -- from the abstract (ski lift gears representing Sundance's star-making machinery) to first-person documentary (Sienna Miller giving Stuart's camera the finger) -- would probably look fine on the big screen, but as an immediate, impressionistic personal essay, it works even better on the Web.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/04/2007 11:48:00 AM

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