Eat My Shorts

At the strangely manic and snowless Sundance Film Festival this January, the dot.com invasion was big news. Yahoo! hosted a chromed and leopard skin networking lounge on main street, Atom Films opened up their golden 'Short Bus' for screenings, and caffeinated Internet acquisition people - from Atom, iFilm, Media trip - were everywhere in town. It all made for an interesting parody of the usual Sundance deal-making that takes place in rented condo's and hospitality suites, even if the Prada Sport-wearing, LA studio-types were keeping calm and dissimulating their jitters.

The audience for Internet films mirrors the early adopters of five years ago: mostly people in academic institutions or corporations with broadband Internet connections. This inevitably skews the choice of material towards sophomoric humour or dark, curdled parody.

Atom Film's greatest successes are with animations like the 'Joe Cartoon' series from Joe Forman, especially Gerbil in a Microwave and Frog in a Blender. The gerbil is, in fact, pretty unpleasant, grabbing at its rodential crotch and taunting 'who's your daddy?' The viewer gets to steadily up the microwave dosage until its eyeballs pop and clots of gore splatter the microwave door. This is what interactive filmmaking is all about.

Atom has 15 acquisitions people travelling from fest to fest with a mission to watch everything - about 30,000 short films in the past twelve months. But the only thing you can say for sure about what makes a film worthwhile for Internet distribution is that it has to be fairly off-beat and unobtainable elsewhere. 'Anything ubiquitous isn't interesting to us, if people can get the same thing on TV then they won't watch it on the web', says Michael Comish, Managing Director of Atom Films in London.

The various short film programmes at Sundance turned up some ideal web fodder, such as Rolf Gibbs' G (1999), a one-shot, four-minute painterly masterpiece based on the idea of placing a camera in the nose cone of a bomb, chucking it out of an aeroplane from 30,000 feet and filming the freefall. Four minutes is the time it takes to hit the ground, but by then the earth has dissolved and reformed, amazingly, inside the frame.

Johnathan Bekemeier's Titler (1999) has an Adolf Hitler character, played by Gregory Roman in a nifty bias-cut dress, belting out acapella show tunes in a bombed-out, Berlin-style location. Michael Horowitz and Gareth Smith's This Guy is Falling (1999), meanwhile, utilises painted sets and computer generated effects that make for a trippy, next generation German Expressionist feel.

Shorts and experimental video pieces are pretty much where the market is now, even if some companies want to go for longer works, 'between five and 15 minutes is the sweet spot' says Michael Comish. Downloading a full feature of 800 mb, even on an office connection, is going to take a hell of a long time; but if you're ready to do it and you've got a computer fast enough to decompress it, then you can grab the word-of-mouth hit of the festival - Miguel Arteta's extraordinary Chuck and Buck (1999) a gay stalker movie shot on digital video about two former boyhood friends - from Julia O'Sullivan's filmsonsale.com.

Floyd Webb, President of Itutu Networks in Chicago thinks the Internet distribution of lower budget digital film is going to cut through a whole layer of Hollywood prejudice that prevents interesting stuff making it to an audience. 'Its all about what we want to see - ethnicity doesn't have to play down quality, but 26-year old Californian studio execs think it does. You can make a science fiction movie starring black people and they say "black people don't like science fiction" - you have to listen to this shit.' Itutu just completed a 10-minute trailer for a movie with Sundance veteran Julie Dash, which, says Webb, is about 'black people and cryptography'.

So far, no one's really sure how the economics of the whole Internet film business really stack up, but they do know that Internet users aren't the same customers who trip to art house cinemas or down to their local Blockbuster. 'The web crowd doesn't buy tickets to indie films', says Blair Witch Project director Ed Sanchez, 'maybe they'll rent a video if a friend recommends it'.

The Blair Witchers argue that filmmakers who are thinking about selling their work via some sort of pay-per-view deal are missing the point: 'We don't have any projects that we're planning to distribute online now. PPV is interesting but it's not utilising the web to its full potential.' What they plan to do is create an Internet hype that will drive people to buy movie tickets - 'You can lie to people as long as its entertaining and if the content has done its job then people will put down their $7.50 to see the film', claims Sanchez. That didn't stop a few filmmakers chasing their success at Tromadance, one of the dissident off-Sundance fests. The Watts Bitch Project was fairly high on most people's must-see list.

By contrast Atom Films also sells the short films uploaded to the site to 15 airlines and 30 TV stations. The filmmakers get royalty cheques based on the number of viewers and the level of advertising on the site, and a couple of them have been getting six-figure cheques for their work.

All of this makes you wonder why art world video makers haven't caught on yet. 'We certainly looked at the Turner Prize stuff', says Michael Comish, 'but with the money on offer, so far its been the artists who are reluctant to jump'.