I had a thought the other day while watching Frontrunners, Caroline Suh’s documentary about the race for student-council president at New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School. The teacher in charge of the election, talking about what he thinks students look for in a candidate, argues for the primacy of personality over ideology. He believes that a particular politician’s take on an issue can change depending on circumstance, while his personality is likely to stay the same regardless. This kind of consistency, he says, is what voters look for when they mark their ballots, whether during a high school election or in a presidential primary. Take George W. Bush, he says. The fact that Bush changed his campaign-era position on nation-building after the events of Sept. 11 didn’t change most of his supporters’ belief that, personalitywise, he was still the candidate they’d most like to have a beer (or two)) with and, therefore, the guy they'd most likely vote for come Nov. 2004.

This personality/issues debate is at the heart of Frontrunners, not just in terms of the election it documents but in relation to the audience’s appreciation of the movie itself. The film’s “lead,” George, is only one of four main characters, but his personality is so enormous, so idiosyncratic, so sui generis, that – win or lose - he is the guy viewers walk away from the theatre thinking about, discussing, and rooting for. Consequently, he is, in essence, the movie.

Trailers your favorite part of the festival experience? Now you don't even have to sit through the film – a couple of the always-funny Burger Hut trailers have popped up at YouTube here and here.

And wax nostalgic with Dan Brown, Mike Mitchell, and Kent Osborne's sextet of 2002 SXSW trailers here. It's hard to predict the shelf life of certain pop culture product, but turns out Three Men and a Little Lady jokes never grow stale. Prescient guys …

SXSW Interactive may end, but some bits keep going, like the Unnamed Exquisite Corpse Movie, which made its sorta, kinds debut.

Taking its inspiration from the old surrealist thought experiment, it brings a new meaning to film-making as a communal experience. Quick skinny: a cast and crew has two weeks to make five minutes of a film. When they're done, they send the last minute of their segment to another cast and crew, and one instruction ("Use something pink." "This actress is pivotal." "There needs to be a fake eyelash.") and see what they come up with. Confused yet? The film makers are betting you won't be by the time it's completed.

"We hope that there will be a through-line, and that there will be a wonderful, watchable movie," said moderator and executive producer Meghan Scibona of Small Media XL. "Actually, we've all watched the first 20 minutes and we're shocked about how well it works as a short."

"It's gone somewhere exciting and interesting," said projected innovator Jason Nunes of Adobe Consulting, "and it's not a mess yet." With four of a planned twenty segments in place, the group plans to send push the experiment as far as possible by getting international collaborators.

They're just wrapping things up at the SXSW Film Awards Ceremony, which means the embargo's lifted and it's time for us to drop some knowledge. See winners after the jump.

Be sure to check out the Chronicle’s daily issues (March 13-15) for reviews and interviews with Festival award winners. And, of course, keep checking here for continuing coverage of the film fest.

The SXSW Interactive party at Scholz Bier Garten brought together a disparate mix of people last night, among them artists, musicians, gamers, futurists, and various techno-friendly types, as well as a few robots, which made their way through the crowd like children who couldn't find the right grownup's leg to hug.

There was also music, free food, masked revelry (admission was free for anyone in costume), and a Maker Faire-esque contingent of groups showing off their pet projects, which included a machine that printed words on ping pong balls; a video game with a curvy, wrap-around monitor; and some of the miniature sets, props, and characters from John P. Funk's short, stop-motion film "Quest for the Dark Planet."

Such oddities are apparently par for the course at these parties, thrown annually by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which seems to have made a lot of friends in its 18 years of crusading for free speech, intellectual property, and privacy rights on the Web.

If there's a keeper image from this year's SXSW interactive festival, it may be Mark Cuban and Michael Eisner agreeing to pose for an on-stage photo with a Flat Eric (ask your six-year-old niece, she'll be able to explain it.)

It was a little bit of a double-act, and they knew what the crowd can be like (Cuban: "We've learned a lot from the Mark Zuckerberg interview." Eisner: "I'll just be saying yes and no." Cuban: "And I'll be talking about myself a lot.") The former Disney CEO was there nominally to talk about his new project, Tornante, but everyone really wanted to know the one thing that he knows better than most: how to make money off content. Which is good, because he admits he knows little about the tech (he even forget to turn off his Blackberry and had to be told nicely by the staff that he was causing the blbvlvlvlvlvlvlvl noise on the PA.)

But seriously. About that money.

There's emotional and creative burn-out to blogging. After a while, it's just hard work, but you're in the zone, and you keep doing it. Add being in a war zone onto that, and you never get to complain about updating MyBlueHamster at blogspot again.

Dr. Carlos Brown, now a surgeon at Austin's Brackenridge Hospital, choked up guiding SXSW attendees through Trapperlos M.D., his blog of his time as a U.S. Navy trauma surgeon in Ramadi in Iraq. There's something slightly surreal about the way he put music to images of life in the operating room: but it was the little things that made life bearable for his family, like letting his daughter know that he had a birthday cake; or when he and his family, separated as they were, could all wear Star Wars costumes at Halloween; and the less grisly memories (like drinking one of the two beers he was allowed during his tour.)

Brown (who has since resigned his commission) calls the blogging experience an essential part of his time there. But he did note that the military has now started cutting back on access to YouTube and MySpace. "People who came after me had a much harder time running a blog, and I guess I got lucky."

Remember Minority Report? Remember the uber-cool control gloves that Tom Cruise used? Remember thinking "I wish I had those?"

The guys at Cynergy Labs were displaying their prototype in the Interactive Trade Show of a real version of the technology. The great/scary thing? They actually work. Running Windows Vista on a Mac, the demonstrators digitally (pardon the pun) manipulated a series of images on a test grid, from a 3D map of the Louvre to a stack of snap shots. The shocker for everyone that was expecting some super-duper high tech solution is that the backbone of the sensor system is a WiiMote. That's exactly the kind of innovation that Enspire's Patrick Sanchez talked about in the interactive issue. Apparently, Microsoft are very, very interested in the results.

Now if we can juuuuuust get that funky projected display Cruise had as well …

One day at the festival, Rooftop Films founder Mark Rosenberg tells me all about Benh Zeitlin’s short film “Glory at Sea,” (partially funded through the Rooftop filmmakers’ fund), making sure I put it on my SXSW can’t-miss list; the next, he’s telling me that Benh and three others from the “Glory at Sea” crew had been in a terrible car accident on their way to the festival, and now Benh’s in surgery. It’s the sort of sudden turnaround one hopes never to happen at a film festival, potentially compounded by the fact that the 25-year-old filmmaker doesn’t have health insurance.