Mark Osborne made his 1998 Oscar-nominated animated short “More” for the large-screen IMAX format, yet most of its viewers have watched it on computer-screen windows about the size of a credit card.
“I had trouble picturing it postage-stamp size,” he admitted, “but I was really happy with how it looked. And now it’s getting seen on the Web more than anywhere else.”
The same can be said for many short films, which mostly were destined for film festival showings and subsequent obscurity until Web sites such as IFILM (which is showing “More”) and AtomFilms came along. The Internet is extending the lifespan of shorts, and in return the shorts are paving the way for a future in which we may routinely be watching movies of all lengths through our computers.
“In the next two to four years, someone will say, `I’d like to see a movie,’ and they’ll have a number of choices: You can download one on the Web to watch on the TV or PC; you could have one downloaded to a handheld device or a monitor in your car,” said Peter Clemente, vice president of the Internet research film Cyber Dialogue. “This is absolutely where the market is heading.”
If that scenario and time frame seem far-fetched, consider this: Two years ago the current top Internet film companies didn’t even exist.
The Seattle-based AtomFilms was founded in Sept. 1998, launched its site (www.atomfilms.com) last March and has acquired more than 1,000 live-action and animated shorts, including one of last year’s Oscar nominees and two of this year’s. Its founder and CEO, Mika Salmi, said the Web site has had more than half a billion hits within a year.
IFILM launched in Feb. 1999 and now has more than 800 short films posted on its site (www.ifilm.com). It also recently announced that it has received $35 million in funding from Sony Pictures, Paul Allen and other investors.
Hollywood money has been flowing into other Internet ventures as well. Warner Brothers has launched Entertaindom.com, which focuses on animated shorts, as does Shockwave.com, for which filmmaker Tim Burton is creating a series of shorts.
Coming this spring are Pop.com, the digital broadcasting collaboration between DreamWorks SKG and Imagine Entertainment (Ron Howard’s and Brian Grazer’s production company), and Icebox.com, another animations site that boasts contributions from creators involved with “Seinfeld,” “The Simpsons,” “The X-Files” and other television shows.
The limitation on Web films currently is that most computers don’t have broadband Internet connections, so downloading films is a cumbersome process and the result appears in a small window instead of the full screen.
A feature-length film simply contains too much information to be transmitted via modem, but many computers — particularly those in workplaces where the connections often are better — can handle shorts.
The fact that short films have been existing on the fringes of Hollywood just made them more attractive to the start-up companies.
“It is a marketplace that none of the major media companies have built a library and built a business around, so it was green field for us to enter that area,” Salmi said.
Yet to Salmi, the appeal of shorts isn’t just their prior absence in the marketplace and relative ease of transmission. The format, he said, is suited to a digital world in which people can watch whatever they want whenever they want.
“You have these boxes called cinemas, and the idea time lengths for people to go watch in terms of revenue and how many showings you have a day was an hour-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours,” Salmi said. “The same thing with television — the way it developed was that you had 30-minute and hour blocks because that’s the way the clock works, so that’s why those lengths developed.
“Now if you have on-demand programming, whether it be via your cell phone or on your laptop or as you’re sitting in an airline seat or you’re sitting in your living room, the time constraints are changing. People are not necessarily saying, `I want something just like I had before.’ It’s like `OK, I have five minutes now,’ or `I have 10 minutes,’ or `I want to see a series of these things.”‘
Yes, he did say cell phone.
“In the U.S. we’re way behind, technologywise,” Salmi said. “In Japan they’re putting animations onto cell phones, and in Europe next year they’re launching 3G, and 3G is broadband wireless.”
Still, he acknowledged, “I don’t think people are going to watch `American Beauty’ necessarily on their cell phone.” In fact, feature films aren’t in AtomFilms’ plans to reach Internet users.
“You’re in this kind of lean-forward, active environment,” Salmi said. “You’re leaning forward at your desktop. You’re also impatient; you don’t want to watch anything too long. Until there’s more of a convergence of TV’s and PC’s, until the venue changes, I think the shorter format is what’s going to prevail.”
Yet Harry Knowles, who created the gossipy Ain’t It Cool News movie Web site, said he already watches feature films on his computer through his DVD drive. “Actually, the pixel quality is stronger on a monitor,” Knowles said. “I just hooked up surround sound to my computer at home. I watch most of my movies at home on it because the resolution is better.”
IFILM editor in chief Andrew Hindes has no doubt that feature films eventually will become part of the Internet repertoire. “There’s no question that the technology will get better, and people will be watching these not just on their computers but their home video screens,” he said.
What’s more, Sony’s PlayStation 2 electronic-games console, scheduled to hit the U.S. market this summer, will come equipped not only with a DVD drive that can play movies but also a high-speed Internet connection to enable easy downloading of films and games.
Clemente speculated that as broadband, cable modems become standard over the next two years, the concept of “download time” will disappear.
“When broadband becomes widely available and affordable, consumers are going to have so many more choices and an AtomFilm will be up against a Sony film or Universal film,” he said.
AtomFilm already is operating like an independent film distributor — if not a record label, as befitting Salmi’s music industry background. It pays filmmakers for the exclusive rights to their shorts — Salmi said the deals range from four to six figures, including royalties and advances — and then posts them on the Web site or syndicates them.
“We sell to over 30 television stations around the world, 14 airlines,” Salmi said. “We have over 15 Web sites that buy content from us. Blockbuster is a big one for buying content.”
Salmi said half of the company’s revenue comes from syndications and licensing while the other half is generated by advertising and e-commerce offerings on the site. AtomFilms is making a big push to promote its name, as is clear from its ads now running on MTV and its sudden prominence at last January’s Sundance Film Festival; its nighttime party was so overstuffed, it had to be shut down by the fire marshals. The company left Sundance with the rights to 20 shorts that showed there, eight acquired at the festival and 12 beforehand.
“We’re a big consumer brand,” Salmi said. “We’re a Miramax for the Internet or an MTV-type company.”
IFILM strives to be more of an electronic community for filmmakers, fans and industry insiders. It doesn’t pay for films or acquire any rights. Instead, IFILM posts all submitted shorts as long as they aren’t pornography or home movies, and user ratings determine which ones are more prominently displayed on the site’s Top 20 list and in other category rankings.
“Our idea is to enable filmmakers to distribute themselves, basically,” Hindes said, noting that the site’s revenue comes primarily from advertising but is also including a growing amount of e-commerce, including merchandise related to “Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Animation,” which struck a deal to be shown on IFILM.
Osborne said no money changed hands in his one-year contract to have “More” shown on IFILM, but the company helped promote his new live-action feature, “Dropping Out,” at this year’s Sundance and on the Web site. In the three months since “More” became available on IFILM, it has been downloaded more than 50,000 times, Osborne said.
IFILM already is showing a feature, albeit one chopped into 10 segments: “The Sadness of Sex” a 1995 film from “Stigmata” director Rupert Wainwright.
“That works very well, particularly because it’s very dialogue driven,” Hindes said.
Dialogue, you see, tends to come through no matter how small or pixilated the movie’s picture is. Some speculate that if the Internet catches on as a popular venue for watching movies, the aesthetics of filmmaking might change as directors tailor their works to the format.
“Animation works really well,” Hindes said. “Comedy works well. Obviously, sweeping panoramic vistas don’t do well. Closeups of faces work really well.”
Not everyone is sold on the Internet as the future of film exhibition.
“It’s still a very, very primitive medium,” Lions Gate Films co-president Mark Urman said at Sundance. “If a short film can be seen anywhere, that’s great, because they usually are shown at the beginning of movies here and go away. But it has nothing to do with feature films. Nothing.”
Variety technology reporter Marc Graser also isn’t convinced despite reports of Web sites receiving oodles of hits.
“All these companies are rolling out, they’re searching for all this material, but at the end of the day does the public really want to watch this stuff? I don’t know,” Graser said. “I don’t know anyone who watches it, and I cover this industry.”
Graser predicted the breakthrough will happen “when the Internet and TV converge” and when the content becomes more mainstream.
“A lot of these short films are like independent films,” he said. “They’re weird. People don’t really want to watch this stuff. When these films start including actors that people recognize, people will start to get more interested.”
THEATERS SEE NO THREAT IN THE NET
One question raised by Internet films is how they might affect movie theaters. Many industry types thought the emergence of videocassettes would sound the death gong for theatrical films, yet business has boomed even after VCRs came along. Peter Clemente, vice president of the Internet research film Cyber Dialogue, says he envisions a similar complementary relationship between the Internet and cinemas.
“The Internet is much less a displacement medium than a parallel medium,” he said, citing a study indicating that people who download movie clips or songs are twice as likely to buy the corresponding movie tickets or CDs. “Yes, it’s going to have an impact. It’s going to have a positive impact.”
Case in point: Mark Osborne said he thinks “More,” his 1998 Oscar-nominated animated short, has an improved chance of reaching IMAX theaters because it has been so popular on the Internet.
“Now people are asking, `How can I see it in a theater?”‘ he said. “So many people e-mail me and ask to buy copies on VHS because they want to see it bigger, they want to appreciate it. So it doesn’t spoil anything to see it that size. It just makes you want more.”
