The upcoming Slamdance film festival will be home to the Filmmaker Summit, a groundbreaking event co-organized by the Open Video Alliance featuring Steven Soderbergh, Lance Weiler, and many others.

The mission of the WorkBook Project / Slamdance / Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit is to jointly craft a new charter for filmmaking, storytelling and content distribution, with and by the global filmmaking community.

Our collaboration is born out of reaction to an independent film industry currently in a state of turmoil and how, as a global filmmaking community, we can better understand and find greater success afforded by new technology and democratization of new tools and processes. We believe sustainable independent filmmaking is no longer about the production itself. Instead, it’s about how filmmakers must now expand their role and take charge of reaching and engaging worldwide audiences across all viewing platforms.

The summit is being produced in a three-act structure: Pre-summit participatory agenda-setting; on the ground event in Park City with Steven Soderbergh, guest speakers from around the world in dialogue with attendees; post-summit collaboration in publishing and marketing the fruits of the dialogue.

We continue to embrace the democratization of media technology as an empowering force for filmmakers around the world. Stay tuned for more details on the Summit and how to participate as the January 2010 festival draws nearer.