Minute by Minute in the Age of Hi Tech: Selling Short Films Now that the World is Flat

For the first time since mini-moguls like Mack Sennett and Hal Roach made their fortunes producing short films for theatrical distribution, talk that short filmmaking is back with a vengeance, isn’t hype. A perfect storm of rapid bandwidth improvements, increasingly media-friendly delivery venues and a globalized network of sales outlets has given birth to an enormous market for shorts ranging from 60-seconds to 30-minutes in length.

Whether you’re ready for it or not, the future of short filmmaking is becoming clear. It’s a genuine revolution that every filmmaker and would-be filmmaker needs to be more aware of. Hordes of well-known film and television production companies are stepping into the Online and Cell Cinema Markets, but they can’t satisfy these new content demands on their own.

The marketplace is hungry for talented newcomers with the ambition to take advantage of the opportunity it represents. But to properly exploit it, filmmakers need to come by a workable understanding its structure and needs.

First and foremost, the most important thing for filmmakers to bear in mind will be that the “marketplace” is in fact made up of three separate and distinct markets. Secondly, and this is really good news, access to all three markets will be less dependant on an accumulation of frequent flyer miles by visiting film festivals than on having a DSL line or a cable modem.

From 60 to 180 Seconds, The World of Cell Cinema

Ever since Verizon introduced its LGVX8000 handset, Apple its 60GB Video iPod, and Sony its video capable Play Station Portable, technology wonks have been divided over the viability of Cell-delivered Cinema. For aspiring mini-moguls however, the answers are simpler. Does take too long to load video content? Yes. Can the buffering issues be aggravating? Yes. Will VCast , MobiTV and their cousins catch on? Of course they will. After all, not so long ago, today’s ubiquitous online video feeds faced the same problems.

More importantly, because there are far more cell phones than computers floating around in our world, the demand for cell cinema may create a much more substantial venue than computer’s have.

For the moment, filmmakers interested in producing 60 to 180-second shorts have a variety of options. For instance; Sprint’s MobiTV offers content from numerous shorts clearing houses-including the UK’s Channel 4, the aptly named ShortsTV, Nano TV, and iFilm (who also supplies Cingular Video). There are similar services popping up everywhere from Germany’s Debital and Vodafone to a Latin American take on MobiTV to Nokia’s new service for Kuwait and Qatar. Even online shorts pioneer Atom Films is offering a new “To Go” service aimed at iPod and PSP users.

But, according to Tim Bajarin, president of the futurist firm Creative Strategies. “Wireless carriers haven’t really figured out the best business model for getting the content onto Palm’s Treo 650 or Sony’s PlayStation Portable. The issue continues to be figuring out exactly what people will want.”

“Mobile movies have to be created with mobile users in mind, featuring simple storylines, basic characters and sharp writing,” said Mitchell Weinstock, vice president of business development for smart phone media player and production tool developer Kinoma.

So the trick will be producing high-quality short films with running times of three minutes or less. Or, as Verizon’s associate director of programming Alex Bloom put it, “A mobile device is not the place for a 30-minute show, I don’t think people have the time or the patience.”

From 5-minutes to 15-minutes, The World of Online Shorts

Earlier this year, the video search engine Blinkx.TV partnered with a group of short film providers-LoveFilm, Tiscali, BBC Film Network, World Cinema Online and others to make thousands of hours of worth of short films available online. It was only the latest move by a company determined to get in on the media revolution that’s leaning more and more heavily on the world-wide-web.

“Shorts have a growing following globally; all the major film festivals now incorporate a section devoted to showcasing them,” said Suranga Chandratillake, Founder and CTO of Blinkx.

This isn’t the first time that comenators have been stepping up to declare that virtually overnight, the ineternet seems to have become “thee” place for entertainment. Back in the late 1990s a slate of online soap operas ignited the same buzz machine before flarring out just as quickly as they’d arrived. But today those predictions, with the exception of those attributing “overnight success” to an eight year-old company like Atom Entertainment , are getting it just about right.

The broadband connections available to hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide have led media behemoths from NBC and Disney to Viacom to purchase stakes in popular web portals in order to take an active hand in steering traffic to their publicity and commerce sites. Increasingly these same media conglomerates are partnering with short film websites- basically viewing them as farm teams for tomorrow’s entertainment franchises.

Supplied by a growing army of computer savvy independent filmmakers from Greenwich Village to Wicker Park to Santa Monica, a solid block of shorts oriented sites has emerged. From the comedy centric Icebox to Shorts T.V. to the comparatively tiny UrbanChillers and the higher profile eBaum’s World -an online comedy showcase that boast over a million hits a day. Together, they’ve quietly become a New Hollywood that’s offering up hundreds of short bursts of entertainment for desktops everywhere.

Funded by a combination of underwriting/partnerships schemes and advertising placed in front of or besides the shorts, alt-online TV networks are still on the rise. C hannel 101 , for example, only attracts around 30,000 viewers a day with its slate of audience programmed 5-minute comedies.

“We had a strong sense when we started there was an audience that wanted alternative entertainment content,” said Mika Salmi, the founder and CEO of AtomFilms. “At some point the internet, or broadband entertainment, will be the home base for anything related to video. Some will look like odds and ends, some will look like TV. We want to provide the right content … we believe in snack-sized content.”

For would-be producers, the most important fact to take out of all of this is that all of these online venues are more or less fully dependant on submissions from independent filmmakers. But the history of the film business (as epitomized by the Hal Roach Studios or to a lesser degree the Republic Pictures model) seems to suggest that specialized shorts production companies are the next step over the horizon.

From 20 to 30-Minutes, International Television and Short Films

Shorts and the web may seem like the perfect match, and in many respects they are. But short subjects are a rather popular feature of Canadian television and an incredibly popular one throughout Asia and across Western and Eastern Europe, and scores of companies have cropped up to drop some serious coin on acquisitions.

The economics of turning a profit will be a bit more complicated, but more than worth the effort as well.

International cable channels such as Germany’s Premiere, IFM, Canal Plus, Channel 4, he BBC, Canada’s Movieola Channel and others will typically buy a one to three year exclusive license on a short film for. Depending on the contract, during that same period a film may be available for broadcast over the internet. In some cases, sellers may be free to license a short to an additional venue such as Frontier Airlines or Amtrak Europe.

According to Roger Gonin, director of France’s Clermont-Ferrand short film festival , “There are more opportunities in Europe than North America for short film makers because short films have a different status and have been recognized more years.”

Essentially, you can expect a distributor such as Big Film Shorts or Apollo Cinema to work to sell your short and have it shown anywhere possible, worldwide. After the first license expires, the distributor can then take your film to regional programmers, where contracts usually aren’t so exclusive.

“Shorts can generate advertising revenue with product placement. And a new trend is their use in infotainment.” Said iFILM’s John Halecky.

He isn’t wrong. BMW’s high-powered campaign of short films as advertisements opened a door that other advertisers have practically been falling over themselves to get through. Ford, Amazon.com, Volkswagen and DKNY have all followed BMW’s lead and according to Forbes Magazine’s Melanie Wells more advertisers are on the way.

Stay tuned for detailed profiles of all of paying markets mentioned above along with many, many more.