As the Internet becomes a part of everyday life and is no longer seen as a big, bad, new medium, more and more pre-existing forms of media are using it as an easy, inexpensive way to reach new audiences.
The film medium is no exception.
Internet-based movie making has almost become a style or genre of its own because the medium itself requires a totally different approach to filmmaking.
Simon Tarr, assistant professor of communications who currently teaches classes in experimental filmmaking and animation, said there are films he has made that he will not show on the Internet simply because the format of the film would not translate well on a computer screen.
Ideally Internet films are short in length and are clearly viewed on the three-inch screen of a video player.
Tarr's web site, www.berserker-rage.com, includes nine of his films, and he encourages his students to display their work on the Internet because it's relatively cheap and easy to do. He added that it is a nice way for the filmmaker to take control of the last step in film production -- exhibition and distribution.
The two biggest Internet movie sites at the moment are www.iFilms.com and www. atomfilms.com. Both started in late 1998 and include short and long films of all genres. Other sites include www.alwaysi. com and www.thesync.com, which has its own online film festival.
Tarr's site, which is independently created and owned, differs a bit from the more corporate Internet-based movie sites like iFilms and atomfilms.
One difference lies in how the movies are viewed off of the Web. On most independent sites, movies can be downloaded to the hard drive of a computer and viewed repeatedly or even copied. But on the corporate sites, the movies are in a streaming video format, meaning they can only be viewed once.
Downloading movies does bring about many copyright issues, similar to the ones surrounding the use of Napster. In addition, when a moviemaker puts his or her film on the Web through a corporate site, the creator loses most of the viewing and distribution rights.
These corporate sites offer free Web space and most show movies at no cost to the viewer. However, some sites like Sightsound.com, have acquired the rights to full-length movies for a short period of time and charge people to download them. One of the films that Sightsound.com acquired was the indie favorite Pi, but during the 30-day licensing period only 100 people downloaded the movie.
This is not surprising considering the current quality of viewing movies on a computer. However Tarr pointed out that in the future, as bandwidths increase, movie viewing on computers would reach DVD quality.
A majority of Internet-based movie sites make their money through advertising, not by charging viewers.
"The sites are hungry for content and people are desperate for exposure," Tarr explained.
Tarr also argued though that some of the corporate sites are becoming less about portraying films and more about entertainment for bored teenagers.
Tarr said at this point he is most concerned with people being able to see his movies and the Internet is one way to view them.
