Michael Conti Productions

Tag: sundance

  • “American Pachuco” ~ Sundance Gives a Legend of Stage and Screen His Due!

    “American Pachuco” ~ Sundance Gives a Legend of Stage and Screen His Due!

    I attended Sundance Film Festival very first screening and community gathering outside of Boulder, Colorado. I was happy to get a group of my Front Range Community College students on the guest list to experience this screening and community event. Thank you Sundance Institute. But the absolute highlight? During the Q&A, the legendary Luis Valdez (iconic creator of Zoot Suit and La Bamba), now in his 80s, was a cultural breath of fresh air.

    There would be no Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl if Luis Valdez hadn’t been on Broadway in 1979 with Zoot Suit in Spanish. And the film we all came to see, “American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez” by David Alvarado was as captivating and inspiring as Luis Valdez.

    This is exactly what Sundance is about: bringing the “best of the best” into our community spaces to inspire us all to make the world a better place. Sundance Film Festival comes to Boulder in January 2027!

  • Filmmakers who aren’t afraid to break new ground

    Filmmakers who aren’t afraid to break new ground

    While our inspirational documentary film, The Unruly Mystic: John Muir, indie budget pales in comparison to a Hollywood film, Boulder Colorado based Michael Conti Productions decision to use an integrated Adobe workflow with Adobe Premiere Pro at the hub, was a given for this tech-savvy and budget conscious producer, director and editor, Michael M. Conti.

    Adobe Premiere Pro was used to edit 21 films that will appear at the Sundance Film Festival this year, up from only 9 in 2014. After pairing up with Adobe After Effects CC, Premiere’s capabilities and ease of use noticeably improved, attracting more and more devoted users.

    Case in point:

    Gone Girl is the first Hollywood feature-length film cut entirely in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

    This final tidbit of news was a welcome surprise to the independent film community.

    Much of the visual effects work was done in-house, which allowed the team to work iteratively, in parallel with the editing. For example, Michael Conti could edit in Adobe Premiere Pro while others worked on shots in After Effects. The saved compositions would automatically update in Conti’s timeline thanks to Adobe Dynamic Link. This integrated and interactive workflow kept shots looking cleaner and eliminated distracting back-and-forth discussions so the entire team could focus on the story as it took shape in the edit bay. This streamlined workflow was one of the main advantages for “The Unruly Mystic.”

    The process of editing this 105 minute movie with Premiere Pro from the ingest of assets (originally shot on two CANON XF100s), to individual scene editing (taking advantage of sub-clip and bin folders), to combining the multiple scenes in a single timeline (flatten) will be a subject of another post.

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