By Matthew Palmer
"Everyone's a director," Eveo claims. And they may be right.
However, not everyone can be a distributor, to release their film
to people everywhere who might want to see it. That is exactly what
Eveo does.
Eveo is basically an online movie theater offering dozens of choices.
Each one is a short film created by ordinary, low-budget filmmakers.
They can digitize their film and submit it to Eveo for consideration.
The site has succeeded by capitalizing on a few important media trends.
It comes at a time of increasing criticism of Hollywood movies and
growing popularity of independent films. The falling costs of camcorders
and the hardware to digitize and edit video makes it accessible to
low-budget filmmakers. The empowering and democratic spirits of the
Internet make it the ideal medium to host Eveo.
Eveo's strengths lie in its diversity and novelty. Limiting their
films to a few minutes, directors have created everything from a black-and-white
comedy in Italian to a regular series of documentary or comedy shorts.
I got the same feeling from Eveo as I do from watching the Independent
Film Channel that this is different, an alternative from the
mainstream. Of course, for this adventurous spirit to be sustained,
sites like Eveo must not become "the mainstream." The moment
it turns into an "America's Funniest Home Videos" or twenty
other copy-cat sties appear on the Internet, Eveo loses some of its
appeal.
In fact, users must keep a spirit of adventure with them because surfing
Eveo is a largely random experience. Each movie has only a few words
given to describe it. If you like it, there is no way to see similar
films, or lists films made by the same director. The series, such
as "Club Girls and Power Games" and "PMS Love,"
could be improved. The format of having a story strung together over
many episodes works much better on television than the Web, partly
because there is a regular time to watch it. This might not be a problem
if the series' content were better or if there were more of them,
two current problems. The series, though, are only a small tacked-on
addition to an impressive library of short films.