SF360 Revealed! Part One: New News
Well, we enjoyed being all coy and evasive for a while, but now that the SF Film Society has officially announced their SF360 campaign, we're free to reveal to you all the juicy details, like a new broadbanded network of digital projectors that they're installing around the city; or a brand new film festial-convention-market for animation; or their new initiative to, as Executive Director Graham Leggat put it, turn all of SF into an "exploded theater." Neat!
Because the Film Society's SF360 program is so multi-faceted, our coverage is going to be split into a five-part series over the course of this week. Today, we're be exploring a local film-news venture by Indiewire.com; Tuesday, we're covering SF360's free online suite of tools for filmmakers and audiences; Wednesday, we're looking at a program in which all of SF watches the same movie at the same time; Thursday, we're covering a network of projectors to be installed in high schools all around the city; and Friday, we're examining three (THREE!) brand new film festivals -- one for animation, one for youth-media, and one ring to rule all of SF's pre-existing fests. We interviewed Graham a couple days ago, so now SFist TOTALLY has exclusive quotes, if by "exlusive" you mean "stuff he told lots of other people, but worded slightly differently." So look forward to us running snippets from our interview with Graham, instead of just reprinting press releases verbatim, like the SF Sentinal does.
After the jump: what's new at Indiewire, and why SF should care.
"We want to cover all the various significant constituencies in the area," Graham told us, referring to SF360's partnetship with Indiewire. The new website will be a clearing house for local filmmaking news -- "everything from new media, festivals, digital production, to the many Hollywood legends that live here, maverick indie filmmakers, documentarians, local filmmakers of all stripes, and other sorts of what you might call film culture phenomenon." Holy geez, that's cool.
Actually, we have to confess to being a little peeved to see this endeavor coming to fruition; setting up just such a local film-news hub has always been one of those back-burner projects that we've thought about doing here at SFist; oh well, more power to SF360 and Indiewire for actually getting it done. "It'll be as if Variety ... started publishing a San Francisco edition," Graham says, "daily and year-round," and if they can actually deliver on that, it'll be a bigger and better site than we could ever have built. So good for them. They plan to launch in early March.
Tomorrow: working with Indiewire's tech folks, SF360 plans to launch a site for film-type folks to network, build projects, and share their stuff. "It's a combination of Friendster and Myspace [SFist: ack!] and Flickr and Basecamp," Graham says, then sweetly adds, "with a dash of SFist thrown in."