By Christian Baekkelund
As the average bandwidth used by people connecting to the WWW has
increased at startling rates, digital compression techniques for video
and audio have improved, and high quality digital video editing hardware
and software lowered in price, a new type of website started appearing
on the Internet. These sites are devoted primarily to short videos
usually made digitally, cheaply, and for Internet only distribution.
Started in 1997, Dfilm.com was one of the first and is one of the
most widely recognized sites of this type.
The D.FILM Digital Film Festival is principally a "traveling
and online showcase of films" made with these cheap retail digital
editing packages. Any person who has made a short film with "new
types of technology" can submit for free their work to be included
in D.FILM's showcase. These films are then organized into a festival
form, printed to film, and D.FILM then travels around the world to
small theatres showing their small festival of digitally enhanced
films to the world. The on-line component of D.FILM is supposed to
be simply an on-line version of this, but in fact mostly contains
only segments from the full works that are displayed on the D.FILM
tour.
The largest problem with D.FILM's current strategy is that the do
not regularly updated their site. Instead, they only rotate the films
available on their site on a yearly basis, which, with respect to
the speed of change on the Internet, leaves them becoming stale quite
rapidly. For example, one of D.FILM's competitors, atomfilms.com,
manages to have far more dynamic content and ever changing content
by not having an accompanying real world version of their online short
films. Instead, they focus entirely on the website and, in my opinion,
are able to have far more interesting, diverse, and regularly updated
content that would keep me regularly re-visiting the website. D.FILM
is, however, a respectfully interesting attempt at making a dual on-line
and traveling film festival for short films made using new digital
tools; such an attempt was inevitable and could have been far worse
than D.FILM.