The key to getting a Sundance film made is…

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, 62% of the films were made using Dropbox. (A pretty impressive number, if we do say so ourselves!) 

As a sponsor of the event for the past nine years, we get to talk to many of those filmmakers about what it took to get their work from page to screen. No matter their film’s subject, from revenge-seeking elders to a wife turned AI humanoid, they all said the same thing: Organization was everything.

“Sometimes people don't think about what it's like to go through hours and hours and hours [of footage],” says director Dawn Porter. “It can be really tedious. Starting to break things down and organize is like the building block. That's the first part of the movie. It's not actually the visuals.”

We asked directors, writers, composers, and producers to explain how they used the organizational power of Dropbox to bring their visions to life.

To take control of the feedback process…

“It was empowering for me, as someone who's worked with Dropbox for years, that there was suddenly a tool that I could use to review feedback seamlessly in my workflow. With Replay, I was controlling the media that was being reviewed. It just kept me from losing my focus.”—William Ryan Fritch, composer, The Battle for Laikipia.

To keep a globally distributed crew on the same page…

“We've always used Dropbox on all of our projects, really. It’s helpful in the remote workflow for post production. Being able to have our archival producer go get full-res from a variety of vendors, have it organized, and available for quick upload and download—to anybody who's working on the project from story producers, to editors, producers, and myself—has always been a primary part of the process. The ability to share with that kind of speed is really helpful.”—Jeff Zimbalist, writer, co-director/producer, Skywalkers: A Love Story

To create truly unforgettable art…

“Because I work on multiple things, it's important to me to have that organization. What Dropbox does is it allows you to take a morass of information and separate it out into something much more manageable. When I look at the directory of topics, I don’t forget. Even the process of labeling helps your mind start to organize and think, Okay, these are all the components. How do I put these together?” —Dawn Porter, director, Luther: Never Too Much

To keep cast and crew as safe as possible…

“Dropbox was a great tool, especially at the moment we were needing it most. We were very cognizant of COVID throughout the whole thing because our leads are older. We wanted to make sure we kept everybody safe, so we got into a remote flow for as long as we could.” —Josh Margolin, writer/director, Thelma

“We use Dropbox all the time, especially for building our production file, whether it was sharing images for approval in the production design process or in collating agreements, keeping track of the legal. It definitely was a home base.” —Zoë Worth, producer, Thelma

To keep track of vast troves of archival footage…

“We've got two folders set up that are pretty massive. The production one, then the post production one. It's our catch-all for everything, really. We can all get on it. It's both a working day-to-day kind of set up, and also a repository for everything we need down the road. There are folders that I don't go into at all on certain days, for weeks or months. Then all of a sudden, I know exactly where it is. On the day that I need to go there, it's there.” —Peter Sillen, director/producer, Love Machina

To make it across the finish line…

“We had to move fairly quickly to meet the Sundance deadlines. Without Dropbox, we wouldn’t have been able to communicate so quickly. Our editor was able to upload as many versions to the platform as we needed—other softwares limit how much you can upload, and Dropbox didn’t have those limitations. When we had very pressing deadlines and needed to review changes and make important game-time decisions, we really couldn’t have done it without Dropbox.”—Diana Irvine, actor-producer, Good One