Slashdot Mirror
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.
Coming soon:
PETRIFIED GIRLS
A short film about three perky 17-year-old girls and the fun misadventures they have in the Land of the Slashdot Trolls.
STARRING:
Natalie Portman as a 17-year-old girl.
Mae Ling Mak as a very mature 17-year-old girl.
Lacey Chabert as a 17-year-old girl.
Rob Malda as CmdrTaco
PLOT SUMMARY:
The three protagonists venture into the Land of Slashdot Trolls, where they are immediately petrified during a long, erotic petrification sequence by Industrial Light and Magic. Then there's a bunch of gay (as in stupid) surreal imagery with butterflies and flowers or something. Then there's the final scene, which shows the petrified girls.... for ten minutes!!!
MUSIC:
None. The petrified girls are what's important.
RUNNING LENGTH:
28 minutes
SCRIPT BY:
Naked and Petrified Guy
SEND DONATIONS TO ME SO I CAN PAY TO MAKE THIS MOVIE
SOC/RO Update: Well doesn't that just be all. Sun/Dance, the Open/Source Movie Festival, is putting its Open/Source movies on the internet. Is this good for the Open/Source movement? Like all things, no. Let me give you an example: suppose you have a box, and a short film. You want to be famous, and make a lot of money like the people who "made" the blair sucks project. The trick is to not work to hard, or do anything creative. In this case, all the "creators" of the blair witch sucks my ass project was find some Open/Source slave actors, throw them into the woods with a film recorder and a "fucking DAT" for a few weeks, and then made a bunch of Open/Source internet hype about their new Open/Source movie in the form of really horrible websites. They then became filthy rich, even though they had nothing to do with the Open/Source movie, which sucked. I have to admit, though, that my favorite part of the movie was when the bitch (played by an Open/Source actress bitch who probably acts exactly the same in RL, IMHO) decided to take the "fucking DAT" with her off by herself in the box, but the dead cat (named Belfry) objected. The ensuing argument was so dramatic! I cried for days, until I stopped. Yeah, damn, that was a good movie, now that I think about it. I really liked the scene with the three Open/Source actors who thought they were in Mexico to do a show, but they end up saving the village from the insane Poke/Mon robots. Good for them they had their toothpaste weapons! I don't know what I would have done in their situation. I have to guess, though that I probably would have found myself a GOOD dictionary, not a Webster's Amerikans Cann Spel dictionary, but an Oxford English Dictionary -- the only dictionary so bad ass it is refered to as merely "the OED" among English professors everywhere -- and beaten down those insane robots from outer space. "That will teach you!" I would shout as the thousands upon thousands of pages crashed down into their little metal skulls. "Now maybe you will THINK! next time before you decide to terrorize a little Mexican village, circa 1934!" Polk would be proud. A weird thing happened to me today. I was at the supermarket, stealing toothpaste, when I ran in to the insane robot KZ-467Y, when he was buying Ornage/Juice. Now insane robot KZ-467Y is an old friend of mine from high school. In high school, he always had a reputation as being a bit of a "psuedo-wild"card what with his crazy antics. Once, he stole a teacher's OED and beat the crap out of the teacher's pet Smorfkonz. Boy was that one not-so-fresh English teacher for the next trimester, let me tell you! That wacky insane robot KZ-467Y. Anyways, what is weird is, after high school, he had turned down a job with an army of evil space robots. "They just weren't insane enough" he had complained. Well now he leads his own army of evil space robots! How ironic! He is currently building an Open/Source intergalactic starcruiser on the internet. He brought me over to his secret underground hideout, and showed me around. "Wow that is pretty neat," I said. "Yes," he said, "it is." But do you want to know the neatest thing about it, reader? "Not really." Well the neatest thing about it was the way it communicates with the evil robot headquarters back on earth. In both the headquarters and the space ship, there are a lot of boxes with an OED, poison, a cat, and a molecule. Before the spaceship leaves the headquarters, evil robots go on a rampage and run around killing psuedo-random cats. Then the spaceship takes half the boxes, and the headquarters keeps the rest. Then to send messages, they just open the boxes and see what word of the OED the dead cat was reading. At least I think that's how it worked.
I will not waste my time criticizing or insulting The Slamdance Film Festival as 1) it is unlikely to change, and 2) The Slamdance Film Festival probably revels in the letters of shock and repulsion that it regularly receives. Instead, I will focus on its frightful contemptuous press releases, which, after all, are the things that scapegoat easy, unpopular targets, thereby diverting responsibility from more culpable parties. Instead of focusing on why anyone willing to study and ponder my position on most current matters will truly find that commercialism is both a belief system and a material, institutional reality, I would like to remind people that its cronies have the audacity to mold your mind and have you see the world not as it is, but as it wants you to see it. That doesn't necessarily mean that we stand to lose far more than we'll ever gain if we don't keep our courage up. Rather, it means that there's emphatically no point in arguing with The Slamdance Film Festival. The Slamdance Film Festival makes a virtue of irremediable fault. The primary weapons of The Slamdance Film Festival's crazy lackeys are lies and deception. The Slamdance Film Festival's objectives can be rightly understood only as what some truculent chuckleheads have been brave enough to call them: a failure. On many issues, discussions with The Slamdance Film Festival quickly turn into fights, and dialogues soon degenerate into name-calling. The recent outrage at The Slamdance Film Festival's wheelings and dealings may point to a brighter future. For now, however, I must leave you knowing that this discussion is meant to apply to modern nihilism only.
i thought indie filmmaking had more to do with distribution rights than money. mind you i'm not a filmmaker so i don't know what i'm talking about :)
"Internet short films are invariable in a proprietary media format rendering them useless to the Free Software community. The community should not encourage the makers of such films and should avoid downloading or visiting sites that offer such films. The GNU project is very interesting in developing a truly free media that would make internet short films viable in the future."
--from GNU website.
-Ciaran (waiting for a password)
this is site with a bunch of great film shorts including Plymptoons and joe cartoons. Plus a wide variety of short films both funny and dramatic. www.atomfilms.com It works great if you have a fast connection (Like I do at my desk) and kind of sucks with a slow connection (Like I have at my home) check it out.
Sorry about the cryptic topic, but IE cuts me off beforte the end of the text box. (I have to work on an Access 2K database that is so unsettlingly unstructured to make me wonder if it works as I want it to. Code I can proofread. GUIs I can't.)
.org or .com, they're all the same. They're all human. You know what to expect from them. I'm sick and tired of ppl blaming it on inanimate objects like capitalism, communism, and the favorites sex and guns.)
But anyway, top sub topics right now, let's get to it comrades (okay so I watched the 1984 movie last weekend.):
MS owning the formats
NSI patenting the linking of content
owns the protocols
(evil entity could be
These really are serious subjects, ignore my sarcasm.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Several sites have already been doing "online film festivals" for 2-3 years now. The Sync's Festival 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 we've put up (such as Nosferatu and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)
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.
sorry.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Mordred
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.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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)
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?
Streaming video is pretty cool.
A decent Network is finally here.
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.
I've never been a big fan of streaming media
live365 and shoutcast
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
+&x
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.
+&x
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...
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/. 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 -- it is one of the best animated shorts I've ever seen.
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?
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
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!
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?
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...
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
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