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Short Attention Span Theater By John Pavlus Reporting by Michelle Fawcett Filmmakers John Pavlus and Michelle Fawcett examine the new venues emerging online, which give hope that short film is not a dead form. So you're a student filmmaker. Your class's screening has just ended. There you are: clutching your precious reel, basking in well-earned praise, looking forward to a liquor-soaked afterparty. You are, to use James Cameron's self-effacing words, "king of the world." Cheers to you. Cut to next morning. Drowning the remnants of your hangover in orange juice, you experience the requisite nasty wake-up call: You're three grand in the hole, the video copy of your masterwork looks like puke warmed over, and thanks to the extra-academic obsolescence of 16mm, it's likely that no one will ever again see your opus through the film it was shot on (yeah, that stuff that cost you the three fucking grand). And as for festival fame, let's face it: Sundance is pretty crowded these days. But hey, all is not lost. That reel of yours will make a killer novelty beer coaster. OK, maybe that's a bit harsh. But in some form or another, the above scenario was, for most short filmmakers, the unavoidable pot of crap waiting at the end of their rainbow. Barring the lotto-win of a high profile festival slot, there just wasn't anywhere for shorts to go. And even those lucky-bastard Sundancers didn't have it much better: Except as calling cards for future projects, their films had little money-making value. Until recently, that is. Dead-end short filmmaker, meet Mr. Internet--he'd like to relieve you of your beer-coaster collection. Indeed, the last 18 months have seen a renaissance of sorts for short films, as a gaggle of cyber-cinematheques have swallowed the much ballyhooed broadband bait and maneuvered themselves onto the front lines of online consumer media distribution. But viable broadband is still a pie in-the-sky, and these content-hungry startups need product. Thus enter short films, whose diminutive scope and right-brained moxie perfectly suit the caffeinated learning curves of typical websurfers. The sitesâ ad banners pepper the cyberscape: Ifilm. Icast. ResFest. CinemaNow. Some, like trailblazer AtomFilms, have even poked ads into mainstream print publications like Premiere, Film Comment, and Variety. Hell, when Steven Spielberg throws his hat into the ring (with the still-under-construction Pop.com), you know something major is going on--perhaps the long overdue windfall short filmmakers have dreamed about. Well, sort of. While some top-tier sites like AtomFilms actually pay filmmakers for their work in order to license the films to airlines or put them on DVD, many do not. For media artist Mara Alper, this is a problem. "Web empowerment comes only after loss of power and voice [in other media]," she says. "Programs that broadcast video art [always] paid licensing fees to artists...[but] media art that might have aired on national networks, mainly PBS, is now self-censored due to content phobia." Documentarian Laura Kissel is more optimistic, zeroing in on the vast exposure the net can provide. "Now you cannot even think that you won't have an audience for what you make," she asserts. And the Internet's democratizing decentrality only helps matters. "If a filmmaker can't get their work on a site like Ifilm or AtomFilms," says Kissel, "all she has to do is get her own web page and a server, and she can begin to cultivate an audience. I'll certainly be putting up my own work." Then there's the quality question. After all, there's quite a difference between seeing work projected 30 feet tall in a theater and downloading it onto a playback screen the size of an index card. An article in the independent webzine Film Threat decries the nascent phenomenon as little more than "illustrated radio." Alper, rightfully so, blames bandwidth: "Until [full] video streaming becomes a reality, I find the limitations simply too clunky." But even when that problem is solved, will the aesthetic issues be put to rest? Filmmaker and IC professor Pierre Desir thinks not. "If you expect [your work] to go to video, youâ're going to shoot differently," he says. "It's just physically different. It's not film if it's on a computer screen." And what if the viewer who downloads your film doesn't have the same screen resolution or memory capacity that you intended the work to be seen with? Jackie Shulman, a student making the transition between film and digital video, agrees that the variables can get messy. "Yes, it definitely won't look the same as [it would] projected," she admits. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. For students like her, who forgo film entirely and originate on DV, the images suffer no generational degradation when exhibited on a monitor. And instead of constantly comparing the two media, Shulman would rather just accept their differences and exploit them instead of resist them. "It's a more individual viewing experience, so it's definitely not cinema," she explains. "It's a whole new digital aesthetic--It will be interesting to see people start shooting differently because of this new outlet." Desir, no Luddite himself, encourages the DIY-ers. "If people want to do digital, more power to them," he says. "But just because it's easier to get [work] out, doesn't mean it's good." And let's be honest: Media portals like AtomFilms aren't necessarily interested in birthing new art forms, they're out there to make a buck in the increasingly corporatized Internet economy. One could take Kissel's advice and put work up on an independent server, but without advertising, who's going to see it? The niche-audience atmosphere of the web makes "preaching to the choir," as Alper says, very easy, but her real question is, "How do you let a wider audience gain access to non-mainstream voices?" Shulman agrees that work must get on popular sites to get seen, and the selection criteria those sites employ are undeniably dollar-driven. "The Internet is just one big advertisement," she says. "In one way or another, you're marketing information." Kissel admits that the realities of online distribution can be daunting. "We're in a new economy--an attention economy," she says, "and the small, low-budget independent is still going to have to fight for attention out there." But for short filmmakers willing to cope with the business end of exhibiting their art form, the climate is better than it has been since the heyday of pre-feature newsreels. Given the flurry of interest, a new short-entertainment genre might even be on the horizon. "We might be returning to a time where, even when we go to the local theater, we might see a couple of shorts before the main feature," Kissel muses. "Wouldn't that be great?" Though they may run out of beer coasters as a result, short filmmakers will no doubt drink to that. John Pavlus is a senior film major at Ithaca College. Michelle Fawcett is a senior film major at Ithaca College. |
