Short Film Online - The Golden Age of the Shorts? Part 1
Short film and business - they somehow seem to be mutually exclusive. But now all of the sudden -- who would have thought it? - short films have become 'big business'. Unfortunately, however, only online!
Perhaps it all started at the NAB '98 in Las Vegas, when the computer industry approached the television and film world with its new AV products. Adobe introduced Premiere 5.0, Macromedia presented its editing programme, FinalCut, Truevision a video capture card and Apple its cross-platform QuickTime media player. DVD, DV and audio streaming were already available at that time on the Internet. Back then everyone was wondering, "What’s Steve Jobs doing at NAB?" His answer: "We have to talk about this stuff!" And the bosses at the big media conglomerates immediately stood up and took notice. While the film industry’s initial concern was fear of illegal distribution of feature films over the Internet, the media groups, television networks and telcos were busy holding meetings and hatching out deals. At the same time, a new generation of entrepreneurs was coming into its own, founding dozens of so-called dotcoms right and left, based on Steve Jobs’ ‘stuff’. Just two years after the NAB, a short film called "More" (Mark Osborne) was viewed 50,000 times on the iFilm.com site, while AtomFilms (on the Web since March 1999) was reporting over 15 million visitors each month.
In May 2000, CNN.com senior writer Jamie Allen wrote an article entitled: "The golden age of the short – Shorts move from film-class project to big time on web". As an example, Allen describes the career of unknown T-shirt designer Joe Shields, who was able to swiftly take the Internet world by storm with his self-made animated film, mere seconds in length. His second cartoon, a simple Flash animation called "The Frog Bender" (a frog in a blender), which he put up on the Web under his pseudonym Joe Cartoon, was soon scoring 2,500 hits a day, overtaxing the limits of his homepage server. Shields took his cartoon to the more powerful AtomFilms server, where it then racked up 700,000 hits per day! "Frog Bender" went on to become a legend. Matt Hulett of AtomFilms estimates that some 30 million users had already viewed its successor, "Gerbil in a Microwave", by mid-2000. This is a degree of exposure that can easily hold its own with prime-time television ratings or a mega box-office hit.
Suddenly a whole new distribution alternative seemed to open up for filmmakers who until then had shown their short film at maybe a dozen festivals before retiring it to the shelf. First off, though, the dotcoms had some persuading to do. They had to find a way to instil trust in their vision, since their plans didn’t initially fall on open ears. Nevertheless, while just a few years ago talent scouts from AtomFilms or Eveo struck out in force to scour the short film festivals for contacts with filmmakers, they no longer need to chase down material. Nowadays they are practically deluged with submissions (if they haven’t modified their business targets since then). The market for short films on the Internet has exploded and, even outside of the online screening portals and middlemen, the Web promises to provide independent films a distribution range and degree of attention that are simply unattainable via more traditional channels. Besides which, the financial investment – at least for digital works – is much lower than that required for conventional distribution. The technology used to prepare and distribute an online film, as well as to advertise it, costs much less than producing and mailing out prints, videotapes and printed promotional material. Finally, high hopes were placed in the Internet as a distribution channel that would allow filmmakers to circumvent restrictive hierarchies and come into direct contact with a worldwide audience. Embedding films within websites on which viewers can also access supplementary information and supply immediate feedback via ‘return channels’ (e.g. placing votes, sending email to the site, site stats), provides the opportunity for an open forum. Back in 1995 at the Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, British producer John Wyver already expressed this hope for the future: "It could happen that, from today’s experiments, the most meaningful and democratic structures for the media world of tomorrow emerge, the birth of a new, decidedly participatory medium".
A few stock market crises later ...
Today, of course, one is forced to take a more sober view of the situation. Many high-flying plans failed to catch on in the market. Some portals, such as Steven Spielberg’s short film project Pop.com, were never even launched, despite large sums having been invested. Under AntEye.com (read anti-dotcom), one finds today a humdrum search engine featuring topics such as "Weight Loss" and "Wedding Invitations". Strikingly similar is the page found under the address formerly harbouring Leonardo Di Caprio’s newcomers competition "leofest.com". The 60SecondFilmFestival currently guides the surfer onto a page announcing that the activities are currently being ‘redeveloped’. And Eveo, which once entered the stage proclaiming such high cultural aspirations, has now switched its focus to tourist films, consulting and software development. As late as January of 2001, the Luxemburg Consortium, Europe Online Networks S.A., announced to the press that it was founding a "short film channel" with films "from independent and innovative directors". Today’s site offers only a small short film corner featuring "weird shortfilms", overshadowed by a more prominent erotic channel. And many other once-promising addresses, such as Dotcomics, Icebox.com and the German effort, Filmgarten.com, have long since disappeared into the ether.
Those among the founding generation of short film websites that do still exist have had their fair share of difficulties as well. AtomFilms was saved only by its fusion with Macromedia, mutating to Atomshockwave, and IFilm Network found itself going into a tailspin, despite Robert de Niro’s support. Its recipe for survival on the current market turned out to be syndication, i.e. licensing out content and know-how to be utilized in as many different ways as possible. This includes offering their catalogues and film databases to other organizations (film distributors, entertainment portals, marketing agencies), as well as marketing various concepts and services in the form of B2B contracts. Hence, Atomshockwave is now working together with partners such as Ford, Intel, Warner Bros. Online, Bell South, HBO and Volkswagen; it seems that these days no corporation, especially those in the media sector, can survive without short films. But the focus is not merely on online marketing. Several of those running short film websites are also active in TV licensing and theatrical distribution. Always Independent Film, for example, sees itself as a network for independent filmmakers and, in this capacity, arranges contracts with film distributors. One must bear in mind, however, that the big portals are in an enviable position when it comes to marketing short films: hundreds and thousands of filmmakers submit their films to them at their own expense. These works, taken on commission, are immediately viewable worldwide (electronic distribution catalogue), and the user ratings principle makes expensive market research utterly superfluous!
…Followed by a thousand mouse clicks: Digital auteurs present tea-time office cinema?
The vision of putting films by digital auteurs on the Internet sounds good and is certainly not too far off-track. Independent filmmakers can produce digital films at home, with the smallest possible amount of technical effort, from shooting with a DV camera to editing and postproduction using a common PC. They can then not only show their film on their own homepage, but also email it to hundreds of other website operators and online festivals. The films are streamed and paid for according to their success, i.e. number of website hits. Some websites even offer production grants and order processing to boot. Just one mouse click and the film can be downloaded for a fee or purchased on VHS or DVD.
But now the situation has changed, at the latest since large Internet portals for short films have been established and the capital of formerly small, innovative companies and independent initiatives has begun to become inextricably entwined with big business. The indie scene has long since been co-opted by the big players in the computer, media and entertainment industry. A ‘media conglomerate’ threatens to emerge that, between AOL and Time and Warner et al, not only controls the film and television markets, but dominates the Internet as well. What counts there is – as always – not artistic quality, but the number of mouse clicks, hits and page impressions. Or, to look at it the other way round, what makes a short film that everyone had long since deemed dead so popular all of the sudden? And who are the audience exactly?
A glance at the top-ten lists (August 2002) kept by the big portals provides some insight. First, one can relegate some sites to the category of "adults strictly rated", i.e. those offering infantile Flash cartoons no adult should be subjected to. At the other end of the spectrum, the gore, splatter and erotic genres are jockeying for position. And somewhere in between there are comedies, violence, science fiction flicks and parodies. At Warner Short Films, for example, "Britney Spears 2032" ("a peek at the pop princess, age 50") is currently in the lead. And even at AtomFilms, which possesses a seemingly bottomless film archive, including the cr?me de la cr?me of international short film production, one now stumbles upon categories such as "Extremes", with titles like "Bikini Bandits" and "Asian Pride Porn". The bandwidth amongst the top-ten animated selections at AtomFilms ranges from Star Wars to Bin Laden parodies. The grabber in the short film category at iFilm these days is called "Simulated Sex". And when one enters the old URL "alwaysif.com" that once stood for the well-chosen moniker Always Independent Film, one now winds up at the, admittedly just as expressive, but unfortunately anachronistic, address "indie.hollywood.com". There, the current favourite is "Cheerleader Ninjas: Director's Cut". (The list of that week’s featured films incidentally also includes, sandwiched between "Summoner Geeks" and "Zombie College", Fritz Lang’s entire "Metropolis"). Last but not least, we must not fail to mention the No. 1 selection on the German Kanal-Global: the speculative short film "Kama Sutra", subtitled "For the woman of today: 33 positions demonstrated!".
Gradually a picture comes into focus of the kind of viewers who account for the exponential increase in the short film audience: curious adolescents and bored male office workers! At the still comparatively respectable AtomFilms website, for example, the users are 80% male, mostly between the ages of 30 and 39, with an income of at least $ 50,000 and a college degree. Sarah Hepola offered an incisive appraisal of this state of things in the Austin Chronicle: "And in case you haven't heard, short films are big business! Capitalizing on our rapidly dwindling attention spans and increasing need for distraction, short film sites help fill the void left when desktop solitaire becomes just too tedious to stomach. For office workers and bored teens everywhere, short films are the perfect distraction; they demand little investment for immediate gratification. Primarily because technology on a grand scale has yet to catch up with this trend, short film sites haven't scored numbers as big as, say, Internet porn, but their viewership is climbing -- and from all accounts, this is just the tip of the iceberg".
This article indeed only outlined the tip of the iceberg. Many interesting aspects remain to be examined: for example, online festivals and their relationship to real-life festivals. Or questions such as, what is the effect of the popularity of Internet short films and related viewing habits on short film as a whole? Which cultural "syndicates" and cooperations are conceivable? We will continue to pursue this topic as new developments unfold – stay tuned for future installments!
Reinhard W. Wolf
Comments and contributions on this topic are welcome:
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