Online filmmaking has arrived

In 2004, filmmaker Tyler MacNiven walked the length of Japan--some 2,000 miles--to impress a girl. Along the way he arm wrestled a 100-year-old woman, narrowly escaped being run over in a train tunnel, got the girl and captured the whole adventure on his handicam.

Unable to find a distributor for his one-hour documentary of the trek, MacNiven, 25, burned 1,000 DVDs and began hawking copies of the film, “Kintaro Walks Japan,” on the streets of San Francisco and at a restaurant his father owns.

One day, George Strompolos, an executive from the nearby Google campus, dropped by. “Dad showed the movie to him,” MacNiven said. “He watched it and said, ‘This is exactly what we need.’”

Today roughly 500 people watch “Kintaro Walks Japan” every day at http://video.google.com, Google's recent foray into the world of online film. And the film has led to MacNiven landing a role on “The Amazing Race,” Jerry Bruckheimer’s round-the-world reality show on CBS.

In the hardscrabble world of independent moviemaking, where films rarely garner an audience beyond a couple thousand cinephiles in sparsely attended art houses and where only one in 10 films ever snags a distributor, cash-strapped filmmakers like MacNiven are increasingly looking to the Web as a way to cut out the middleman and deliver their masterpieces to millions.

In the last year and a half, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all created online video services that let Web users search and watch a library of thousands of movies on their computers. The tech heavyweights join a list of already popular sites that include iFilm.com, AtomFilms.com and YouTube.com. They are all vying for a piece of the more than $1 billion that advertisers are expected to spend on ads on online video sites by 2008, according to Internet research firm eMarketer.

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all been promoting their mainstream video content--NBA games, "CSI" reruns and Kelly Clarkson videos, to name a few--quirky, independent films have been generating most of their millions of hits. According to the Online Publishers Association, over 60 million North Americans watch Web videos at least once a week.

What are they watching? Just about anything. Among the most popular videos in recent weeks have been “Sockitumi Sosumi,” about a sock puppet who performs feats of strength, "Loverboy," a series of animated shorts featuring spermatozoan characters, and an animated Star Wars gangster rap video.

That audience is revolutionizing the way filmmakers market their creations. Three years ago, Ben Rekhi scored an indie hit with “Bomb the System,” but when he shopped around his latest flick, “Waterborne,” about a terrorist attack on the Los Angeles water system, he was roundly turned down.

The only distribution offer on the table promised to pay one-tenth of the more than $1 million Rekhi had sunk into the movie. But rather than hand over his financial future to a distribution company, Rekhi came up with a counterintuitive scheme: He would give the film away free over the Internet.

“We had been offered a traditional six-figure distribution deal,” Rekhi said, “but we looked at it and thought, if they’re paying us X and they’re making Y, what’s stopping us from making Y ourselves?”

In January, Rekhi uploaded the film to Google Video. Since then, 35,000 people have watched it. And in early February, Rekhi set a price for viewing it: $3.99. “Now that we have an audience, we can start making our investment back,” he said.

At the Sundance Film Festival, North America's largest independent film festival, the streets of Park City, Utah, were abuzz in January with the promise of Web-based film.

“If last year was the year of the iPod, then I think we might see this being the year of the short online film,” said Joe Beyer, Sundance’s chief online producer.

Sundance streamed 50 of the 81 movies in the short film competition on its Web site this year. Where the biggest audience a short can pull into a festival theater is 2,500, more than a million people viewed shorts on the site in its first few weeks.

“We were astounded,” Beyer said. “It’s galvanized the whole programming department here. We want the Web to be like an extra theater for the festival.”

A teenaged generation of filmmakers already seems to grasp the potential of the Web. “It’s so easy for kids my age to pick up a camera and make a movie,” said Raquel Cedar, 17, a high school senior in Los Angeles who recently produced a short film called “Beat Boxing Grand Master Sock” that is available through a number of Web video sites. It features a multicolored, woolen sock puppet mouthing beats and melodies.

“Right now Hollywood is on the decline," said Cedar, who has created 34 other videos over the last two years, many viewable on Web sites. "I think there’s a new wave of really young independent filmmakers who are going to change everything. Hopefully, I can be a part of it.”

E-mail: pfw2102@columbia.edu