|
|
To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu
-------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNet Australia. --------------------------------------------------------------
|
Hollywired: Movies on the Net By Yahoo! Internet Life, 0 April 17, 2001 URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Hollywired-Movies-on-the-Net/0,139023166,120216034,00.htm
 The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online--is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired package takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed. Check out our interview with Angelina Jolie, the confessions of a would-be movie pirate, a look at online animation, our guide to film download sites, and Roger Ebert's two cents on Hollywood's new nightmare.
The next picture show
Confessions of a would-be movie pirate
Angelina Jolie raids the Net
Flicks you can click
Will the Toons inherit the Earth?
Tinseltown for the taking 
The agony and ecstasy of the online movie business.
by Randall Lane
The Sundance Film Festival is a poorly named event. Sundance is a ski area, but nobody who attends goes skiing. It's a film festival, yet few bother to see many movies. What Sundance attendees (actors and directors, producers and executives) really do all week is gossip and network, preferably in a chalet with freely flowing booze and a roaring fire. And since it takes place in January, if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut, you'll get a good idea of what's going to happen in Hollywood over the next year.
This winter, the word from the mouths of Hollywood's whales and minnows alike was a familiar one: Internet. Mirmax cafe launches a pay-per-view movie download system. Richard Link later premieres two films he edited on a home computer. The giant Sundance Digital Centre displays the latest in online movie technologies and applications to wide-eyed audiences. And the festival itself, along with other fests (including Y-Life's own, in March) has gotten into the business of showcasing a number of films over the Web. New this year, the Sundance Online Film Festival coincides with the offline festival. This may seem a bit strange, considering that 2000 was a disaster for anyone trying to push video over the Web. Dozens of companies failed, including such high-profile ventures as DEN, Pseudo, and Pop.com--the last of these featuring the biggest names in the business: Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, Ron Howard, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Brian Grazer.
But could this just possibly be the year that the big show on your little screen begins in earnest? While DEN and company were failing, the number of people with high-speed Net access more than doubled last year, reaching nearly 12 million home users in the US, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, and the average new computer now comes with considerably more memory. These two facts conspire to make producing, distributing, and watching video via computer a reality. Yes, we're a long way from the hundreds of millions of people who view television or attend movies, but we're nudging toward a critical mass.
The Internet film movement's march toward that milestone will catch a big break this year. If Hollywood's writers and actors go on strike in, respectively, May and July (and it looks as if they will, despite some recent headway in negotiations), figure that for at least six months no movies will be shot, no TV sitcoms or dramas produced, and no scripts purchased. With all sides heavily bunkered, traditional Hollywood will grind to a halt.
Digital Hollywood, however, may end up doing just fine. Web sites aren't covered under the current contracts, which means that some of Hollywood's best talent may think about giving the Net a try. Faced with nothing but reruns on TV and a slowdown of new movies in theaters, ordinary viewers will also begin to tune in, especially if A-list writers, directors, and actors begin popping up online. Says director Robert Rodriguez, who broke into Hollywood famously with the US$7,000 El Mariachi and currently has the special-effects-laden Spy Kids coming to theaters, "When everyone is asleep, it's the perfect time for revolution."
The R-word, of course, has been spoken before, but this time it may be for real, albeit less revolution and more evolution. Venturing out from Sundance to the epicentres of this sea change [Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York] we found five major trends, all taking off right now. Last year was all courtship and flirting, but 2001 may be the year motion pictures and the Net finally get hitched.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual
Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed. The Napsterisation |
 John Favreau and Vince Vaughn, seen here in Swingers, will appear together again in Favreau's highly wired Made, a gangster comedy. |
And well they should be. As many as 400,000 movies (from clips and shorts to full-length features) are downloaded every day, two of the more popular being The Matrix and Mission: Impossible 2. True, that's small potatoes compared with the estimated 50 million music files that once switched hands daily on Napster alone. But when you consider that the average movie is perhaps 90 minutes long, compared with some four minutes for the average song, the time spent with so-called pirated movies may have already caught up with music. Hollywood executives have been bracing for the day when Cast Away is as available for free downloading as "The Real Slim Shady."
Their fears may soon be realised. The technology for sharing a movie is no different than for a song; Gnutella already allows for it, while the old Napster just needed an infusion of Wrapster (a free program that allowed it to share other files besides MP3s). The question was simply when processing power, bandwidth connections, and computer screens would all become big enough to make watching video on your desktop feasible.
A 90-minute movie can now be compressed to 500 megabytes. A high-speed connection can get you that movie in 30 minutes--not fast, but no more time than for downloading a big piece of software. And the screen is now irrelevant. DVD burners are the hot new gadget for 2001; Apple's G4 even comes with the device installed. Download, burn, then watch it on your big screen--you don't even need to keep the file. Suddenly your computer can become a pirate video factory, churning out an endless number of DVDs. Eventually, you may not even need a burner. A site called X10 already sells a gizmo that, by wireless transfer, turns your TV into a computer video monitor. No wonder Hollywood's nervous.
Of course, Hollywood was also nervous when television came out. And when cable popped up. And when VCRs invaded. Napster upended the music business, yet music sales have never been higher. "The music industry will always be the first line of defense," says Favreau. "They're the pawns, the fodder." But compared with the music industry, Hollywood maintains a key mental advantage. Music feels free. You get it on the radio; four hours every week in the car alone, if you're like most people. But you're used to paying for movies, whether in the theatre, at Blockbuster, or through premium cable.
Maybe that's why much of Hollywood is wising up and working with the new technology rather than against it. Miramax's Sundance-timed Internet release of Guinevere was the first of a dozen movies it will offer using encryption technology from SightSound.com, allowing users a timed, 24-hour viewing license for US$3.49. Jack Valenti, the president of the Motion Picture Association of America, predicted that same day that many of the major studios will follow suit this year. "You don't fight file-sharing technology," says Scott Sander, SightSound Technologies' cofounder. "You don't fight Microsoft. You don't fight the consumer. Otherwise, it's not going to be pretty."
Sander's proposition is simple: "Do you want to pay a few bucks to not break the law, get good quality, no virus, and not tie your line up at a file-sharing site?"
But even if everything works perfectly, piracy by people who want free movies will still be largely unstoppable. Just one store-bought DVD, one bootleg video, one hacked download, and the genie is out of the bottle. A big test comes this June, when a certain movie featuring a certain buxom video-game character hits screens. Tomb Raider, starring Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, "will be the single most pirated movie in the history of the world," says one Digital Hollywood chief executive, who asked that his name be withheld for fear of infuriating Paramount. "The chatrooms are already flying. They're so ready for it." With that release, the Napsterisation of the movie business will have officially commenced.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
But just as the elder Eisner understands Main Street, USA, the younger Eisner, 27, and his partner, Bruce Forman, 29, understand fraternity row. Booty Call attracts 1 million unique users a month. And starting this month, they'll have to pay three to five bucks a month to see all of it.
"It's one Taco Bell meal, two nacho grandes," says Eric Eisner, clad in baggy jeans and a green sweater. "If you're complaining about it being too much, yet you have a computer with broadband access, well, you're not being very reasonable." Forman, the (relatively) buttoned-down one of the pair, adds: "The jokers are no longer wild all over the place. The free ride's over."
While it's easy to shrug off the plight of the failing dot-com companies, there's a real effect on consumers. Companies that broadcast original Net programming must now figure out a way to actually make money. Pay-per-view online will remain the exclusive purview of live sports and big-budget movies. Charging a subscription price (just as Showtime, or Sports Illustrated, or a hundred profitable porn sites do) will become a more common solution for the Romps of the Net. "Whether it's HBO or a cell phone, we're pretty comfortable paying a subscription fee," says Michael J. Wolf, a senior partner of the media and entertainment group at Booz Allen & Hamilton. "Membership models will absolutely work on the Internet."
Of course, just as it is on television, most of the entertainment available on the Web will still be free, driven by ad revenue, often in the form of bits of streaming media. Ironically, these ad-based companies welcome and even promote file-sharing technologies like Napster, which serve only to disseminate their product and increase the eyeballs viewing the ads. "It's like turning a piece of entertainment into a grass fire," says John Evershed, CEO of Mondo Media, an animation company that syndicates its cartoons, each with an embedded 12-second ad, to more than 30 sites. These ads will become harder to skip through as the companies get more sophisticated. One of the sponsors of Mondo's popular Thugs on Film series is Altoids, which the main characters, Stubby and Cecil, have been known to munch on during the show. Invasive? Perhaps. But it's at least one price you're going to have to pay to see high-quality programming on the Web.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual
Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
As Eric Eisner talks about the future of the Web, flanked by a life-size blowup doll and scrawled blue-chalk graffiti that runs up and down the brick walls of his site's offices, a visitor can only wonder: What would Daddy think? Daddy in this case is Michael Eisner, chairman and CEO of Walt Disney, protector of the virtue of Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and the Little Mermaid. The younger Eisner and a partner run The Romp, a site for young men that figures out the lowest common denominator and then shoots below it. Its top shows are Booty Call, which lets you help a pimp named Jake score, and Bill and Ted, which features cartoon Clinton and Kennedy as stoner sidekicks.
The Romp's Bruce Forman and Eric Eisner admittedly aim to appeal to the lowest common denominatoor -- and then some.
Have you ever toured a movie-studio back lot that looks exactly like a real city except for the lack of people? That's what the headquarters of Net animation channel Icebox felt like this January. A year ago, it was hiring so many animators that company officials needed a giant warehouse halfway between the heart of Hollywood and LAX to house the company. Walking around there this year, you could see the proverbial tumbleweeds rolling; row upon row of empty work spaces, the result of cutting back the staff to 25 from 103 between November and January. "We're thinking about setting up a homeless shelter here," said chief executive Steven Stanford, strolling around the emptiness.
Just one month later, Icebox had melted down completely, yet another Digital Hollywood pioneer with too many arrows in its hide. Darwinism has invaded the world of original broadband entertainment. Most of the current players will fold or get gobbled up; the strongest of the strong will survive, and maybe even thrive as part of the next phase of original Web streaming content: the megachannel. "At the end of the day, there will be three to four significant players," says Stanford, "each with an infinite amount of choice." Outside observers concur, predicting that the Internet will mimic fee-free television, which has dozens of choices but retains four dominant networks. The difference, of course, is that these television networks mint money and thus assure their existence--the root challenge for the megachannel. "They're still going to have to prove their business plan can work," says Amir Malin, CEO of Artisan Entertainment, which created perhaps the Net's biggest marketing coup to date, The Blair Witch Project.
History will be their guide. Sites like DEN and Pseudo died for two reasons: First, they were too ambitious too early, not enough people had the bandwidth to watch their offerings. Second, they were too diffuse, even those surfers with high-speed connections had too many places to find such content. Accordingly, not enough people came to any of them. No audience means no advertising. No ads means no money. No money means sayonara.
The first step toward a real megachannel came in January, when Shockwave.com and AtomFilms joined forces, creating an online network that draws about 9 million unique users a month, already larger than most cable channels. And the dealmaking is just beginning. "My task is to make sure we get bigger very fast," says Mika Salmi, the founder of AtomFilms and now the CEO of the merged company. He says that he gets callers almost every day inquiring whether he'd like to buy a smaller channel or sell his network to a larger company. By the end of the year, this Pac-Man-like process will provide users with a group of clear leaders for programming. MediaTrip.com, Ifilm, Hypnotic, and Yahoo! Video should prove major players. And don't be surprised to see another giant, like RealNetworks or AOL Time Warner, buy itself a seat at the table.
Unlike the major television networks, these megachannels won't need to offer only one program at a time. They'll be able to showcase a broader array of programming and become entire systems of their own, with an array of subchannels, in much the same way that Yahoo! and AOL currently offer a deep experience reading and chatting in dozens of subject areas.
But breadth will go only so far--the key to driving traffic is hits. Not the page-view kind, but the kind of addictive programming that hooks you in every day or week for a fix. The Fox network needed The Simpsons and NFL football to establish itself as a sustainable venture; the Internet networks will need similar must-see products.
The surest way to guarantee a hit is to stockpile storytellers and stars. For the former, AtomFilms/Shockwave has already signed up the likes of David Lynch, Tim Burton, Trey Parker, and James L. Brooks, all people with track records and a following. Getting the stars has proved trickier, but as broadband access proliferates, they'll come around. "I'd first have to understand the [union] politics, but yes, yes, why not?" says Jeff Goldblum, the star of several Hollywood blockbusters, looking decidedly un-Sundance as he sits in a black leather jacket amid the snow-capped peaks surrounding Park City's Yarrow Hotel.
While the long-term future of the Internet belongs to live action, in the near term most of the breakout shows and stars will probably be animated, both because of the slowly evolving interest from big-name actors and the advantage animation has streaming over a 56K modem. "The Web will be a breeding ground for characters," says Mondo Media's Evershed, "which will lead to spinoffs in TV and film."
With all this talk of hits and stars, ads and spinoffs, don't be surprised if the online networks evolve in the direction of their traditional television counterparts. Ifilm will shortly begin an Entertainment Tonight-type show on the Independent Film Channel. Adds AtomFilm's Salmi, "Long term, strike or no strike, we're going to be in the TV business." That said, sometimes even the old-media route isn't enough: Before tanking in February, Icebox had already sold a comedy, Starship Regulars, to Showtime Networks, and Fox had ordered a pilot script of Zombie College, one of Icebox's top series.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
Since 1929, the spooky Chateau Marmont has lorded over Hollywood from its perch atop the Sunset Strip. The hotel is a safe space where celebrities act like celebrities. John Belushi died in a ground-floor bungalow. Montgomery Clift convalesced in a penthouse suite. Jim Morrison dangled from its windows. How perfectly appropriate, then, to find Kevin Wendle, the CEO and cofounder of Ifilm, eating breakfast and discussing the next great film prodigy: you. "We're about to see the explosion of the home director-producer," says Wendle, who also cofounded CNET and is an executive founding member of the Fox Television Network. "Overnight successes will be made--that's the power of the Internet."
Wendle has already created such a success. Last summer, Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt finished a three-minute short film, 405, about an airplane that makes an emergency landing on a Los Angeles freeway. Total budget: US$300 (including a US$75 traffic ticket). It was posted on Ifilm, and in less than a year, almost 3 million people have downloaded it; only MediaTrip.com's short comedy George Lucas in Love has even approached those numbers. The partners were bombarded by offers, got representation from the Creative Artists Agency, and quit their day jobs.
Even two years ago this would not have been possible. With talent, you can become a rock star with a US$200 guitar; a writer, with a beat-up typewriter. But given the expensive equipment and know-how needed to make a film [and the connections to get it shown] Hollywood has always been an insider's game. No longer. Branit and Hunt used a digital video camera, which can be had for US$3,000, and edited the film on their home computer. At Sundance this year, more than 40 percent of the festival submissions were shot in DV.
"It opens up filmmaking as much as acrylics opened up painting," says Richard Linklater, director of Slacker and Dazed and Confused, as he sits in his modest hotel room above Sundance headquarters. In less than three hours, he would unveil Tape, an Ethan Hawke/Uma Thurman psychological comedy he shot in six days using DV and edited on a Mac using Final Cut Pro software. And his Waking Life, an animated feature using cheap rotoscoping software, was arguably the highlight of the festival.
On such sites as Ifilm, AtomFilms, and MediaTrip, any movie can reach the masses with ease. The amazing fact about the success of 405 isn't the total viewer numbers but the viewer rate: about half of the people had broadband access at the time. As that total soars--some 27 million people should have high-speed connections within three years, according to Forrester Research--a similar kind of penetration would reach Gladiator-type numbers.
If your taste runs more toward Temptation Island, DV technology and broadband connections allow people to turn their lives into unedited, uncensored versions of The Real World. At CameraPlanet.com, you can watch surprisingly gripping footage of an angry protester chaining himself to a McDonald's counter in an attempt to shut the restaurant down. At Z.com, the entrepreneurial and highly popular Dare for Dollars features people eating dog food and digging through manure for cash and prizes. None of this is beyond the capabilities of a high school cameraman, and all of it has a chance to be a hit. And like the guys of 405, these hits will transcend the Internet. At Sundance, David von Ancken was awarded a US$1 million deal from Universal after winning a Hypnotic online short film contest. "People who are developing a loyal audience on the Internet," says Doug Liman, the director of Swingers and the upcoming The Bourne Identity, "will carry that into television and film."
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
by Josh Robertson
Not everyone got to see The Phantom Menace the day it opened back in May 1999. I did, but only because a friend won a radio contest. Everyone else had to wait in line for hours with light-sabre-toting weirdos. Or you needed an Internet connection. Say what? Yes, you could get the movie online, or so it was rumoured. Back then, the only film I'd seen online was a clip of a zookeeper having a bad day in the elephant house--I had never downloaded a full-length picture. So I set out to change that. Episode I seemed an obvious place to start.
 Franciso Caceres |
The URL ended in .fr--France. Things that aren't legal in the US often are legal in France. But "server too busy" messages led me back to the discussion board. After reading dozens of posts like "I watched star wars as a kid. phantom menace is great! please make more sequels!!!", I decided this wasn't the elusive lair of lawless whiz kids I was seeking.
I then found a Tripod page called the Phantom Menace Download. It asked me to click on an AllAdvantage banner. I got an operation timed-out error. I then followed a link to the guy's home page, where he confessed, "I'm sorry, this is a fake site. I just put it on to get people to come to this page." Pathetic.
Further sifting through the Google results proved fruitless. I started clicking on anything in a foreign language. Swedish, Portuguese, Polish--sometimes, things that are illegal in the US are legal in Sweden, Portugal, and Poland. But no... more gaming sites.
Soon, I had located a few underground primers on the art of capturing bootleg films. I wasn't going to get a movie straight off a site; I'd get the address of a file transfer protocol (FTP) site, from which I'd download many big files that I'd then stitch back together. Bootlegged files of all kinds are known as "warez." Some of the formats I'd be dealing with: MPEGs and AVIs cloned from DVD, DivX, or VHS.
So I crammed the Google window with these terms: ftp warez DVD DivX, and I came up with sites hawking, as it were, their warez. Pop-ups everywhere, fake links, and no movies. Then I found a site called XS 4_ALL.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
XS 4_ALL (apparently unrelated to the Dutch ISP XS4ALL) does not store movie files; it gives FTP addresses where you can find movies, MP3s, and games. But after perusing a few FTP archives, I abandoned my dream of finding The Phantom Menace. FTPs are a crapshoot. Sometimes you get MP3s. Sometimes you get software. Sometimes you get Family Guy episodes.
I found The Sixth Day but couldn't download it. I found Unbreakable, but the slow file transfer rate meant a 10-day download. So what could I get?
Bring It On, the cheerleader movie with Kirsten Dunst. Within nine hours, I was watching prancing young girls in pleated skirts. I've had worse times. But the film had been taken from a "screener" tape, so the quality was poorer than VHS, and "You are committing a felony by watching this film" crawled across the screen.
The experience was exciting nonetheless, and before the Bring It On nymphets had reached nationals, I was cruising FTP sites again. I found X-Men, which had an encouraging "DVD" in the file name. This took only four hours to download, and the picture looked great. Two days later I snagged Vertical Limit, then Charlie's Angels....
My FTP adventure was pretty retro in terms of technology. People shared MP3s with FTP sites before Napster, so I decided to try CuteMX, sometimes called "Napster for movies." With CuteMX, you search for the file you want, then download it from another user. Unless you're looking for porn (which you'd never do), you probably won't find what you want. If you do, the size of bootlegged films presents problems. Getting a three-minute song on Napster can be hard; transferring a 450MB movie using CuteMX is a miracle.
Hunting pirated movies online can be fun; the cheap thrill of getting a movie off the Net almost makes up for the probably cruddy image. But Bring It On was not The Phantom Menace. With Napster, you had access to a vast library of music. Searching for bootlegged films is like snooping around someone else's rec room, at least for now. You might find something halfway interesting, but you probably won't find what you're looking for.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
by David Thomas
With Angelina as Lara Croft, the Net has already given Tomb Raider a thumbs-up. But the early buzz has Hollywood scared of premature burial.
jolie: Antoine Verglas/Corbis Outline; So why is Hollywood scared to death of too much word of mouth, even if it's a virtual droolfest? Paramount, distributor of Tomb Raider, did everything but threaten a mummy's curse to prevent Y-Life from putting Jolie on our cover two months before the movie's release. Studio reps rattled on about "overexposure," but to any Net-head with one-click access to Tomb Raider spy reports, the concept of overexposure seems so... 20th century.
Judging from the Tomb Talkbacks on Ain't It Cool News, which grow more positive as the release date nears, Paramount has little to fear. That was important to producer Lloyd Levin. "I think the Ain't It Cool audience is part of the core audience for the film," he says, "and we're very concerned if something pops up there that is critical of what we're doing."
Garth Franklin, founder of Dark Horizons, says the studios fail to understand the motivations of Web-surfing cinephiles. "There's so much product coming out nowadays, the Net helps people be more choosy," he says. "If they're devoting a lot of time to a particular movie, they've already made the decision to see it." Jolie also seems to know which way is up: "There's an image about Lara, something she represents that people like and we hope to capture," she's said. "Lots of people love this game. We didn't want to dismiss that."
Bottom line: Raider makes an excellent test of Hollywood's assumptions. So, Paramount, let's make a deal: If Tomb tanks come its release, we'll back off the early coverage. But if it blows away the box office, you'll gladly get with it. Just remember: Once something gets out on the Net, there ain't no taking it back.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual
Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
Hey, you! Please remove your eyes from the pictures at right and put them back in their intended position. Of course, when you've got the hottest living actress, Angelina Jolie, portraying the hottest virtual action hero, Lara Croft, that's easier said than done. Since last spring, when Tomb Raider's casting coup was announced, the world's biggest movie-scoop sites--from fanboy-driven Ain't It Cool News to biz-oriented Dark Horizons--have buzzed with script speculation and casting wish-lists. In the past six months, Dark Horizons' Tomb Raider page got more hits than any other film, even The Lord of the Rings. This is the kind of fevered anticipation a movie studio should die for.
Jolie as Lara Croft (with gun): Alpha/Globe Pictures, Inc.
By Christopher Null
Believe it or not, many film download sites survived the dot-com shakeout. Here's our guide to what's out there.
The new Shockwave.com is the spawn of a merger between AtomFilms and the old Shockwave, two of the most popular sites for shorts on the Web. The new company continues to crank out shorts as well as animations, such as Shockwave's revival of The Critic. Altogether, the conjoined site is one of the most consistently high-quality entertainment hubs on the Net. From lowbrow humor (the Bikini Bandits and Angry Kid series) to excerpts from such shorts as My Mother Dreams the Satan's Disciples in New York, which won an Academy Award last year, many of the thousands of titles here will make you want to watch.
Only slightly less popular than Shockwave.com, according to PC Data, Ifilm is more of a film destination than a site for shorts. The focus here is on gossip, news, filmmaking how-tos, and feature stories, with original programming playing second fiddle. While the text content is top-notch, a number of great shorts can be found here-â€"from digital cause célèbre 405 to original selections from the Spike & Mike animation series, to the online resurrection of Mr. Bill. Sure, the pop-up ads are a real nuisance, but Ifilm is better than ever.
Home of cult fave George Lucas in Love, MediaTrip made headlines again with the announcement that its popular Flash-animated series Lil' Pimp is headed to the big screen. Meanwhile, you can check out the antics of the country's youngest playa through the regularly updated online episodes. MediaTrip is also the host of countless feature stories, interviews, message boards, and so much other content you couldn't possibly sift through it all in a week.
Z.com is a raunchy, in-your-face experience designed to get hip young kids in on the act. There's such music-based entertainment as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alanis Morissette concert footage, and Z.com has drawn attention for its Dare for Dollars Webisodes, which feature sob-storytellers taking on disgusting and/or embarrassing challenges for cash payments. From "Bobbing for Maggots" to "Whipped Cream Bull Riding Challenge," the episode titles are self-explanatory, not to mention grotesquely hilarious content.
In partnership with Universal Pictures, Hypnotic aims to be a kind of online/offline film factory, and has grandiose plans to distribute its programming through all types of media. If the site overcomes its bugginess, this might become a good idea. Still, it's a reliable source for high-quality independent films, such as those shown during its Million Dollar Film Festival, along with high- profile projects like Doppelganger, starring Rebecca Gayheart and Timothy Olyphant.
It's a little odd that some of the most popular programming at ALWAYSi (which bills itself as "The Independent Entertainment Network") is made up of clips and trailers for studio feature films such as Hannibal. The remainder of the site is indeed indie-driven, with such spoofs as American Beauty Pie and Pies Wide Shut dominating the shorts that are available for consumption. To be sure, there are some gems to be found among the 1,000 or so attractions at the site, but its content partnership with Ifilm means you don't need to scour ALWAYSi for the good stuff.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
The D.Film Digital Film Festival presents a new entry as part of its year-round fest on a regular basis, each a high-quality short or other oddity, often from a well-known director (such as Doug Liman or Agnieszka Holland, whose short The Wedding is one of the site's most popular titles) or a rising star (such as comic-book artist Dave McKean). Its quality content is unavailable anywhere else and makes up for the paucity of material. It's also one of the few sites that lets you download entire films for local, jerk-free viewing at your convenience. What's more, D.Film mounts a real-life film festival that has played in cities from San Francisco to Cannes.
Never mind the crummy name, because FilmFilm is a great resource for indie filmmakers at any stage of their project. From casting your movie to finding a set builder, the guides available here make locating your crew a snap. In addition, the site will host your production's Web page, or simply let you pitch your project "to the world," ostensibly to find collaborators or the necessary financial support you need to get started. Of course, you can watch your own and others' final products until you're blue in the face, too. And judging from the overall quality (or lack thereof) of most of the shorts, that's not such a far-fetched notion.
What can't you find at Yahoo!'s emporium of digital entertainment? Not much, unless you happen to be looking for something that's new. Yahoo! Video's extensive film archive lets you stream full, big-time features, seemingly exclusively from the silent eraâ€"Charlie Chaplin is the site's No. 1 star by a long shot. Still, the site has dug up some modern content; for example, The Doom Generation is open for viewing. One warning: Good luck making sense of the site's organisation.
Home of 2000's ambitious Quantum Project, ostensibly the first feature film to be released exclusively for online sale (for US$3.95), Sightsound is now known for releasing the Internet's first dud. Starring John Cleese and Stephen Dorff, the reviews of the 32-minute "feature" have been damning, leaving visitors idly clicking on Sightsound's other content, which leans strongly toward children's programming (one word: Barney) and music videos by obscure groups. It also created a splash recently by making the Miramax theatrical release Guinevere available for download.
At "The Internet's First International Short Film Archive," you can browse through an infrequently updated collection of location-themed shorts from such faraway settings as Brazil and Japan. At ShortFest's companion site Anything That Moves, 10 filmmakers are given a predetermined theme or score and asked to create a short work. Sounds promising, but the site is still in its infancy.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
by Christopher Null
While online entertainment quakes, animation is riding high
Seen the one about the microwaved gerbil? Or maybe you've gone Behind the Music That Sucks? Out of virtually nowhere, animation on the Web has become a pop culture phenomenon in an era that has seen online entertainment flounder helplessly. Once highfliers, the big-time film sites have faced a year of heartache, with Shockwave.com's December buyout of AtomFilms symbolising the end of one era and, possibly, the beginning of another. Today's animated fare isn't just kid stuff; it's very adult, often raunchy, and always hilarious. And it's attracting some of the biggest names in show business.
   MERRIE MELODIES IT AIN'T: (from top of page) Kozik, Gary the Rat, Stainboy, The Goddamn George Liquor Program |
In the age of short-attention-span theatre, animation rules. Shockwave.com, with 30 million registered users, regularly flirts with the Media Metrix 50 (which lists the most-trafficked Web sites), and it draws more visitors per week than sites for Disney or MTV. But that doesn't mean that animation hasn't had its pitfalls. In February, the once-mighty Icebox, home to animated shows from Jonathan Katz, John Kricfalusi (creator of Ren & Stimpy), and Seinfeld's Larry David, announced it was shutting its doors.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
So what's the secret to a successful animation site? Not much, according to Simon Assaad, co-CEO of Heavy, the producer of Behind the Music That Sucks. It's "the same reason some TV shows work and some don't: whether they're compelling or not," he says. Animation draws more viewers because it's more creative and takes more risks, Assad adds, thus building a devoted, regular audience. "I don't think anyone's been successful at doing a live-action narrative show online," he says.
Michael Yanover, senior vice president of entertainment for Shockwave, says file size is another major issue; because of this, people with slow connections (who make up the bulk of the Net) can share high-quality animations. "If it's a great experience and only two people can see it, it doesn't help you," he says.
Robert Hertzberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research, sees the boom in animation's popularity as more of a cost issue, pointing out that it's a lot easier to draw something than to get a real actor to do it on cue.
"Film is inherently much more complex," Hertzberg says. "It's expensive. It's resource-intensive to create short-form movies, even where the actors don't get paid much. It's a lot less complex to create animationâ€"you can have one person alone creating it. And if you have a successful strip, you can develop a following. A microwaved gerbil doesn't hurt, either."
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
Item: The Industry Standard reports, "While no one will say it out loud, privately [movie executives] admit they're terrified Hollywood will be Napsterised: that some college kid will post a movie-swapping program that will explode in popularity, swiftly creating a ravenous audience of millions of users who will expect free access to Hollywood blockbusters."
Item: In January 2001, Apple introduces a new G4 desktop computer that includes iDVD software and DVD-R/CD-RW drives that enable users to digitise movies and burn them into DVDs. Compaq has a similar desktop on the way. The US$3,500 computer incorporates a Pioneer drive that itself was priced at US$5,000 weeks earlier.
Item: Two weeks after the Apple announcement, writer-director Richard Linklater premieres Waking Life at the Sundance Film Festival. His animated feature was produced by Austin, Texas, computer-animation wizards Tommy Pallotta and Bob Sabiston. They made it on their Macs, using Sabiston's Rotoshop software to digitise live-action video and serve it up for animators to play with.
Item: A Wired magazine article on Pallotta, Sabiston, and their Flat Black Films reports that Sabiston may package Rotoshop software, "since it runs on relatively cheap G4s." By comparison, Wired says, Pixar, the Toy Story shop, "this year bought 250 Silicon Graphics workstations, which typically run up to US$30,000 a pop."
Both of these technologiesâ€"-iDVD and Rotoshopâ€"-will spread quickly. Rotoshop holds the promise of extending the digital indie revolution from live action to animation. And iDVD is a way to quickly copy and distribute films that can play on any DVD machine. When this all comes to pass, the movie industry's fear of Napsterisation will reach the loathing stage. When the Standard article appeared in January, the threat seemed to come from online file-swapping programs, but the new iDVD hardware and software are more ominous developments that threaten Hollywood's domination of both production and distribution.
Apple has a demo of iDVD on the Web, showing how easy it will be to take QuickTime movies of an innocuous day at the beach, for instance, and burn them into a DVDâ€"-for sending to grandma, perhaps. That hypothetical grandma got a lot of attention after Steve Jobs, the CEO of both Apple and Pixar, rolled out his iDVD announcement. A ZDNet story reported that one analyst wondered if average computer users would "be able to shell out $3,500" for a machine capable of running iDVD.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
Good question. One answer: A year ago, people were shelling out $3,500 for a slower machine that would not run iDVD. A better answer: Those DVDs will be much more useful for what Hollywood considers piracy. Grandma will have to wait her turn as college-dorm entrepreneurs digitise new movies, burn them into DVDs, and send them out into the world.
Of course, pirated digital copies of new movies have been moving stealthily around the Web for years. The late Scour Exchange was a trading post for users with movie files, legal or not; it was shut down in November 2000 after a movie-industry lawsuit. But even if Scour succeeds in its current plans for a legal rebirth, it will not become a Napster-like Hollywood nightmare. Recent Hollywood movies circulating on the Web will invariably be illegal, and unlikely to be found on a convenient Web site.
More likely: a clandestine movable feast in cyberspace that changes its location daily or weekly, with the URL circulating underground. Since the enormous size of feature-film files makes them impractical for anyone without a T-1 line and a lot of storage, wide-scale piracy is impracticalâ€"-or was, until iDVD. It's one thing to watch a movie on a US$3,500 (or US$1,000) machine. It's another to slip a disc into a US$199 DVD player. Burning a DVD is obviously an easier way for pirates to distribute their booty; if Hollywood is Napsterised, it may be by burners rather than looters.
At the same time Hollywood's war against piracy heats up, it will be facing another battle with the emerging indie animation breakthroughs. I was present at the Sundance world premiere of Waking Life, saw the standing ovation, and heard the buzz afterward from would-be filmmakers who talked about obtaining Rotoshop or its kin and making their own animated features. Sabiston told me he hesitated to sell Rotoshop but decided he might as well, since similar programs will no doubt appear.
Why is indie animation such a breakthrough? Because it's easier to make a low-budget animated film look professional than to do the same thing with live-action digital video. Your roommate running down the street looks depressingly like your roommate running down the street. Rotoshop him, stylise him, exaggerate his movements and speed, costume him, and suddenly he looks like a superhero.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
What Rotoshop does is not new but old: It "rotoscopes" existing live action so it can be stylised as animation. From early Walt Disney to the summer 2001 release Final Fantasy, that approach has made animated movement look more lifelike-â€"because it is.
The Blair Witch Project showed beyond argument that a US$35,000 movie shot on digital video can gross upwards of US$140 million. It probably also demonstrated that such a miracle could happen only once. For the most part, mainstream megaplex movie goers expect a film to look as if some money was spent on it. Thanks to Sabiston and Pallotta, transmuting low-budget footage by animation to make it look measurably slicker has now become practical. Combine digital video, desktop computers, and Rotoshop, and you will sooner or later get a sensational movie from a junior Spielberg labouring in his archetypal garage.
Consider, too, that Garage Animation doesn't have to have the seamless final perfection of The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast. Audiences have been conditioned to accept low-tech animation, all the way down to the calculated simplicity of South Park. Rotoshop animation is several big steps up from South Park in the general direction of Toy Story; that it was made by hand (well, by Macintosh home computers, Final Cut Pro, and Rotoshop) doesn't keep it from looking sensational.
The news about iDVD and Rotoshop in early 2001 suggests that maybe we were all betting on the wrong pony when we assumed movies would be distributed on the Web. Video on demand is still waiting for more bandwidth. There's a utopian vision in which filmmakers showcase and distribute their wares on the Web; few people want to watch a 90-minute movie on a computer monitor. Even though Miramax posted one of its features on the Web in January (downloadable for a fee), and even though Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America announced that other studios would also start streaming features, this will not be big business for a while.
But how about this emerging model: The Garage Filmmaker posts a trailer, a free scene, or even the first 15 minutes of a new film on the Web. If you like it, you buy the DVD. He has no overhead apart from his desktop machine, because he burns the DVDs only as needed.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
So now what Hollywood faces is a simultaneous attack on its two semi-monopolies, production and distribution. Of the two, distribution is more threatened. We may see a new age in which Garage Filmmakers make masterpieces for preview and sale on the Web. But your typical Garagist, like the independent filmmakers who gather at Sundance every year, have no desire to continue working on minuscule budgets and grilled-cheese sandwiches. For every dedicated aesthete who cherishes his hermetic lifestyle, there are a thousand who want to be rich and famous. The game plan is, you make the movie for US$25,000, it becomes a hit, and you sign with Disney and work with Cameron Diaz.
But, distribution, now... What would it really mean if iDVDs of new Hollywood movies were whizzing around the campus, and the country? And if anybody with a capable computer could make additional perfect digital copies of them? There would be a minimal impact on first-run box office, because 1) most movies make most of their money in the first month, and 2) the people who buy tickets want to see that particular movie in a theatre. But pirated iDVDs could cut into the aftermarkets of satellite, cable, network, and video. We're talking millions here.
What countermeasures can Hollywood take? There is always the law. Piracy, after all, is theft. But Web distribution is a hydra-headed monster. Unauthorised copies of original work have a slippery way about them and find themselves in strange mail boxes almost by accident. Whizzing around the Net, iDVDs would be less traceable than email attachments.
Hollywood will defend itself in three ways: 1) by vigorous copyright enforcement and prosecution of pirates; 2) by emphasising the extra bells and whistles and classy covers and booklets of legitimate DVDs; and 3) by offering some new features for Web downloading, either during or after first run.
Will Hollywood survive its techhead competitors? Of course. For one thing, moviegoers like to see stars, and Hollywood can pay them. For another, audiences like live actors better than animated ones. First-run theatrical exhibition will be more or less unaffected. And most consumers will always find it easier to buy movies at Virgin, Tower, Blockbuster, or Amazon than go to the trouble and risk of obtaining them illegally. Maybe pirate iDVDs will only prime the market for legitimate merchandise, as MP3 downloads have boosted retail music sales.
But one thing's for sure: Just as the big record companies lost their monopoly to countless smaller companies in the 1950s; just as hip-hop and rap were end runs around expensively produced music; just as the networks lost their monopoly to cable and access channels, so will the new technology create a parallel market of filmmaking and distribution. This could be fun.
The visionaries of film, video, and animation have already set up shop online -- is Hollywood about to take the plunge? Our annual Hollywired report takes a look at where the industry is now and where it's headed.
Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.
