Along with my On The Scene indieWIRE report of the 2008 Sarasota Film Festival, I've including a bunch of extra snapshots of the fun time I had at the fest:

Wednesday night kicked off with a outdoor party on Main Street which featured jumpers from Helen Hood Scheer's documentary, "Jump!"

A lot of cool filmmakers were in attendance, including Mark Brecke and Jason Mitchell, whose Darfur doc "They Turned Our Desert Into Fire" screened at the fest.

Mark Brecke, a well known photographer of genocide around the globe, was nice enough to give me a copy of this gorgeous book, "Darfur Darfur Life/War" that features his work as well as others in documenting this tragedy.

You can buy a copy of "Darfur Darfur" here.

A fun trolley shuttled folks over to the Siesta Keys for a beach party. Here, we have Jury members David Nugent (middle) and AJ Schnack (right) along with Austin McKinley (left), whose short "The Last Word" screened at the fest.

On the beach after we exchanged our shoes for flipflops we were greeted with this bevy of shrimp, a literal boatload full!

Melissa also tried out her hula hooping skillz on the pretty, powdery sand.

Afterwards, a gorgeous Sarasota sunset closed out the evening.

The next day while walking around town we discovered this fellow crossing the road. There's a joke in here somewhere. Can anyone identify this particular type of bird?

With birds in mind, Director Alex Karpovsky and Jon Hyrns represented their film, "Woodpecker" at the festival after premiering at SXSW.

Along with shrimp, another of Sarasota's decadent parties featured a table full of candy, which brought out the kid in all of us.

At the closing night party, Sarasota honoree Charlize Theron walked the red carpet and greeted numerous fans and photographers.

As the festival wrapped, Joshua Safdie gave an amusing, discombobulated speech after accepting two awards for his film, "The Pleasure of Being Robbed." Congrats!