Film Festival Puts Short Films on the Web

A Big Gnu Thrush writes "This Variety.com article talks about the Slamdance film festival and how the marketability of short films over the Internet is allowing more short films to get face time at the festival." Slamdance is not starting until Jan. 22, but the stuff that's exhibited there will definitely be worth watching.

Indie films already on the Net

[TheSync]

Several sites have already been doing "online film festivals" for 2-3 years now. The Sync's Festival [thesync.com] allows viewers to vote for their favorite movies in several categories.

When we first started the festival, we got a lot of concern from filmakers about intellectual property and people ripping off their films. As a result, the films you see online in their entireity are the ones with smaller budgets. Often they, well, are not the highest quality. But then sometimes you do find a gleaming pearl among those oysters...and that's why we still do it.

We stick to under 30-minute films, as statistics show that is the longest 99% of people watch streaming video for. But with broadband there will eventually be a niche for longer films. Some people do watch the full length of the few feature films [thesync.com] we've put up (such as Nosferatu and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

Short Films

[Orion2o6]

I think highspeed access is really openning some doors for the whole indie movie scene. I think it would be kinda lame if they started doing online movie festivals. Hmm... oh well.. hollywood sucks anyways.

Re:I have something to say.

[The Original Bobski]

It looks like the output of a "bullshit generator" to me.

insert less than btwn comments/200

[Rares Marian]

sorry.

Re:Film Festival Online

[Mordred]

Man if you're using a 9" monitor you REALLY need to upgrade.

Mordred

hooray!

[Travoltus]

Maybe people will start noticing these lesser movies and appreciate the quality of some of them, and generate a market demand for someone to provide seed money for more stuff from that artist. Maybe one of these folks will strike it big.

Sick and Twisted

[In-Doge]

I'd really like to see shorts from this festival archived on the web. I went to the one this year for the first time and it was just pure chaos, and the cartoons were friggin hillarous!! Anyone got any links where I might be able to find some of them? (I know Beyond Grandpa is on the web at http://www.beyondgrandpa.com/, but my friggin terminal here doesn't have quicktime, and I can't install it either... argh)

Re:Short Films

[mystryda]

ya, it's opened a lot of doors, some of which i'm sure they wished were closed--i just know that at school we watch fills right after they open at the theatres without paying a dime (except the $80 we pay at the beginning of the semester for telephony, etc.) people go into the theatre, videotape it, rip it onto a couple of mpegs about a gig long each, and throw them on the network. granted, they're a little bit grainy, but when you're a poor college student you don't really care. i mean, come on now, to the pragmatist it's scotch-free.

so, ya, it's opened a lot of doors. the guy with the nice vid card that sported video out and the 21" tv was pretty popular.

Re:I have something to say.

[suprdave]

Are you mixing up Slamdance and Sundance?

SPAMdance

[MorboNixon]

To augment Slamdance how about SPAMdance? It could be the festival that celebrates the annoying users who e-mail these friggin' mpegs and such to all their friends and waste my bandwith and diskspace! The winner could be given a lifetime supply of SPAM and a trip to Hawaii (where SPAM is a delicacy) in exchange for promising *never to touch a computer again*! Who's with me?

Re:Short Films

[network51.com]

yep, they suck big time. I'm just glad the horrible Armageddon movies are over with... at least I hope.

Re:I don't get it

[network51.com]

Streaming video is pretty cool.

Re:Why you should boycott Internet short films.

[netik]

I used to spend alot of time at the FSF, I've done work on many open-source projects, and I can't agree with this statement. Why should I stop watching movies online just because the community et.al hasn't gotten around to coming up with a standard yet? Why not just work on one. I don't feel a boycott is the necessary solution. CODECs are hard to write. They take a fairly large amount of research and development, and once that's done few people want to release it into the world. Fraunhofer has chosen to release some source code for their mp3 codec so people can have a starting point to develop from. There is a large amount of source code available out there from SGI and others to do video compression and it's probably not too hard to come up with an open standard. Of course, once it's finished, The main problem is penetration. It's going to be hard to get the open standard out to all of the browsers that exist and convince the 'common' (i.e. non-geek) audience to use them. I'll use them, but people like REALNetworks has a greater market penetration. (but they suck, and I'll be damned if I'm going to use Windows media player. Some of the linux .mpg tools are cool as well, but the compression rates just aren't good enough) Even quicktime has gone completely, disgustingly commercial with it's idiotic drop-down tray. Is there any escape from noise? Let's work together to make a better standard instead of boycotting. That takes up valuable resources.

Not a lot of interest in this

[heroine]

Judging by the comments there obviously isn't a lot of interest in this from slashdotters. The whole idea of integrating movies and the PC is called convergence and nobody is promoting Linux as a convergent platform. The mood is really quite the opposite. So when we see these stories about using your web browser to watch movies on the internet it's like stabbing the Linux community in the back.

Re:I don't get it

[Wah]

I've never been a big fan of streaming media

live365 [live365.com] and shoutcast [shoutcast.com]

I listen to streaming music at least 5 hours a day, only stuff I want to, and NO commercials. Streaming music kicks ass (yes, you do need a broadband connection, dial-up is soo 20th century). I'll agree with you on the video part, but I don't think it will take 10 years. Things are improving on both ends, bandwidth and processing power. Bandwidth gets you the bits and processing rearranges them into pretty pictures. I've seen a few good streamers, and the pr0n industry seems to have it working fairly well (or so a little bird told me), but I think 3-5 years is more accurate than 10. With a good server, off-peak times, and a bit of luck I've gotten full screen video that's within a factor of 2 to TV (antennae) quality (Wierd Al's Star Wars video is a good example).

BTW, another good short film site is AtomFilms [atomfilms.com]

Re:You're right, you don't

[Wah]

streaming video would be a helluvalot cooler if it weren't for theiving companies like Real Networks. BTW, I won't be using your site until you drop their format, I don't condone subliminal cracking.

Online vs. Real World

[strulock]

Most film festivals are launching grounds for budding directors, actors, etc. hoping to get their films released into broader markets. By running a film festival on the web, the films definitely may receive greater exposure.

However, while it's pretty exciting to see the emergence of a film "festival" on the web, there are definitly shortcomings to the format. While the web format does provide a much broader audience, the film festival is a highly targeted audience. The web is an elective media, while the film festival is not. As distribution companies, producers, etc. evaluate films at the high profile film festivals, these films stand a much greater chance of seeing a larger market.

While the web format is ideal for mass exposure, don't count on having your short film picked up for distribution...

Re:Film Festival Online

[suprdave]

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO of Slamdance.com, so this post is a bit self-promotional and obviously biased.

While it's true that going to a film festival is an amazing experience, it is usually either an expensive or exclusive experience as well. With our limited resources, Slamdance can only accomodate a few hundred festival-goers per day, and for only a few days a year.

Admittedly, right now the bandwidth isn't there for a rich online film experience, but by making due with existing technology, we can help indie filmmakers get their work seen by a potentially huge audience.

Not to mention, it didn't take a huge screen for South Park to catch on... A little 320x200 window can still convey brilliance and originality.

And speaking of originality, make sure to check out our initial selection of online short films at http://www.slamdance.com/anarchy/ [slamdance.com]. Beginning on January 22, you'll be able to watch and rate 21 of the best shorts from over two thousand submissions. My personal fave is Graveyard Jamboree [slamdance.com] -- it is one of the best animated shorts I've ever seen.

Funny thing that

[SuperJ]

Indie movies are based on the premise of not having money, while high-speed access is dependent on having lots of money lying around. What's up with that?

Get it already!

[Kon]

People don't seem to realize that this kind of thing is an infancy stage for bigger things to come

Streaming video is actually improving. It's easy to sit and say 'well, right now it sucks'. Stand back for a second and compare it to what was available 2 or 3 years ago.

It's a great avenue for anyone with a camcorder and some editing software to be able to produce low budget and push their movies out to the masses with no overheads. That just can't be beat.

Venues like this and ifilm.com are bound to produce a lot of budding movie enthusiasts who have more the reason to produce something NOW, whereas before they were stuck with budget constraints and the impossibility of dealing with Big Brother publishing organizations!

A long-overdue increase in screen space

[lrund]

This is just the sort of thing that can help combat the single biggest problem in getting your film seen: distribution.

There are plenty of independent studios nowadays trying to turn out "Blair Witch" clones, be the next Spike Lee, or hit the big time on a tiny budget like "Clerks" did ("Clerks" cost about 25k to make and was shot on 16mm film). There is no lack of good material that lots of people would enjoy. But the problem is how to get independent films in front of people.

The bottleneck is the number of theaters, and the "gatekeepers" for access to those screens. Operating a theater has become progressively more expensive recently, and has been reflected in the cost of tickets and the disproportionate percentage of screens devoted to hunting for the next blockbuster (if you as a theater manager have four screens, are you going to risk devoting 25% of your screen space to a low-budget unknown film, or are you going to add another five daily showings of "The Phantom Menace"? Your decision can make the difference between being able to give another 5 people jobs or not... or even being able to pay rent on a large-square-foot building or not.).

Distributors like Orion (one of the more daring distributors... they are very large, with contracts for a good percentage of screens, and they have shown a willingness to consider and distribute independent films... a risky thing in a guild-run and union-run industry) have contracts for a specific number of screens, and unless a "Titanic" or "Blair Witch" shows up, the theaters will be reluctant to mess with those contracts. The distributors like to make their stockholders happy too, so they go for big-budget blockbusters in preference to low-budget high-risk films. Contrary to popular belief, most coprorate decision makers DO want to "do the right thing", no matter the industry, but when you're answerable to the stockholders and the Securiies and Exchange commission, you *must* put profit first. If you don't, you get to stand on a streetcorner with a "Will Promote Films For Food" sign.

Given that we're not going to see a doubling of the number of screens any time soon, and given that "art cinemas" (usually theaters converted from showing porno films that have been zoned out of existence) are on the decline, what's an indie film to do?

So here's the $64,000 question... will this be successful enough for indies to occasionally make a "crossover" and pick up mainstream distribution a la "Clerks" and "Blair Witch" and "Do The Right Thing"? Is this going to be the preferred method?

And if it starts to work... what are the guilds going to do ensure they get a piece of the action? And what are Viacom and TCI (ahem.. I mean AT&T) going to do?

Film Festival Online

[BWS]

I've been to the Montreal and Toronto Film Festivals and others and I agree with people who day that Online Films are both a good and bad things.

Good things is that it allows people who do not have access to go there to watch it. I mean the jest of it is that a lot of short films take a LONG time to make it out on video and some people like me just don't have the patience.

On the other hand. Going to a film festival is more then watching the movie. its a total package experience, talking to the producer. The fans, the crowd. Even taking a loved one. Imagine sitting in front of the 9" monitor with your loved one, now isn't dressing up and going to the film festival with her much more fun?

IMHO...

I don't get it

[Mordred]

Maybe it's just me but I'm not sure exactly what the appeal of these short films is. Granted I've downloaded some before and even enjoyed a few.

It just seems like the medium isn't advanced enough yet. Streaming stuff off the internet doesn't give near the quality to make it worth my mind. I guess you could argue that the quality of the presentation isn't nearly as important as the content, but it seems that much of the content is lost on users turned off by the presentation.

I've never been a big fan of streaming media and I think streaming video (while impressive) isn't good enough yet to actual be profitable (and worthwhile for the end user). IPv6 may change that somewhat by enabling higher and more consistent bandwidth, but I doubt it'll be the answer to our problems. Until modems are a thing of the past I don't see this stuff having lasting appeal.

I'm a big fan of digital presentation, and can't wait for TV/Movies to be streamed from the net to my bigscreen... personally though I just don't see it happening for another 10 years or so... if that soon.

Mordred