First reason why it's okay to be in the film industry in Orlando was evidenced last night at the "Capstone Films" showing by University of Central Florida Department of Film undergraduates at the DMAC, and his name is Sterling Van Wagenen (the Director of the UCF Film Department, the co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival and the founding executive director of the Sundance Institute.) The students showing films last night were freshmen when Sterling took over the department, so in many ways the high quality of some of those works speaks as much to how Sterling has shaped that department into something extraordinary as creating The Zora Neale Hurston Institute for Documentary Studies or attracting truly inspiring staff like Ula Stoeckl to the region.

Best of all, Sterling has this amazing vision of entrepenuerial filmmaking and entrepenuerial independence that's extremely energizing: it's how he hopes to differentiate the UCF film program from other film schools. Emphasizing the "small businessman" aspect of filmmaking ... a necessarily indie view ... I think is one of the emerging trends in independent scene. I've argued to entrepenuers before that they are the "indies of the business world" and vice versa.

But I really like the phrase "entrepenurial independent" that Sterling has coined. It even answers some of Mike Monello's questions about independence. I think the term encompasses a number of trends from service deals to self-distribution: it's not a synonym for independent, it's a sub-type of independent. Sterling even hinted last night that he's proposing an MFA program in the UCF film department starting in fall 2005 on ... get this ... "Entrepenuerial Digital Filmmaking".

I'm going to start making this a weekly series in my blog (if only to argue that Orlando isn't quite as po-dunk a film community as some of my friends fear I must be stuck in.) I just need to remember to start bringing a digital camera with me.