The First Sundance Online Film Festival

Rebort looks at the highs and lows of Sundance's cyber experiment

The Sundance Film Festival's first foray into online film is a relatively low-key affair. Although the intro blurb on the site promises that it provides a showcase for "some of the most exciting work being made for the web today" it doesn't quite live up to that expectation.

For a start, there are only 18 shorts in total in the three sections (Animation, Digital Video Works and Interactive Works). This is a small number when you consider that there are fewer limitations to putting film clips online than films in the cinema.

It's also clear that these are not works specifically made for a web audience, bearing in mind the kind of limitations that current bandwidth limitations impose. Even with a fast connection, viewing these RealVideo clips at the optimum size (users have a choice of 56k, 100k, 300k) does not always yield great results. The subtitles are usually the biggest giveaway, reduced to thin, blurry and illegible lines in the necessarily small RealPlayer window.

For example, in Crazy Bloody Female Center, the clip is actually a fuzzy excerpt from an interactive CD-Rom. I can't work out why there is an interactive section since there is no way of actually interacting with the content once you start up the RealPlayer, at least, when I tried it.

Elsewhere, the problems are less technical and more creative. Alex Orelle's Freeware, while highly competent in the 3D visual and soundtrack departments, has a thin storyline about an action heroine shooting her way out of a futuristic corporate stronghold. It felt a bit like looking over someone's shoulder as they played a computer game. I don't want to do it down too much though - I did enjoy it all the same.

Storylines are always a problem with shorts. How to engage someone with the film and end on a strong, memorable note? The Great Big Cartoony Show, a retro-styled carnivalesque kiddies' theme for a fictitious cartoon show, simply avoids having an ending, closing where the show is supposed to start. The male vocalist races through a tongue-twisting shopping list of toonies with funny names. The animation and tune are brilliantly pulled off, but it would have been nice to see the cartoon go somewhere.

Marco Bertoldo's Gone Bad, a stylish animation about a priest's unorthodox methods for carrying out the Lord's work, blends spaghetti western and zombie genres with a dry wit. The film is an episode from a larger body of work, which means the ending lacks a certain finality, but the visuals, which appear to have been created in Macromedia Flash, are brilliant: dark, eerie and atmospheric.

In fact, the animation strand is easily the strongest element of Sundance's Online Film Festival - which probably is a fair reflection of the current situation with video on the web at large. Animation seems to hold up well in terms of quality both on the audio and video side.

Also, well worth a look, particularly for fans of Eastern European animation, is Little Milosh, a burlesque fable about a timid man who makes a friend with a goat he meets in the woods and then teaches his bullying wife a lesson, with the help of his goatie friend. The story has a dark gothic quality to it that is reminiscent of Tim Burton.

In a similar vein is Romanov: Scarf Mania a less sophisticated, but gently amusing fable about fashion. Made in the style of a silent film the visuals and simple story (about a scarveless man in a city of scarf-wearers) have an appealing childlike quality about them that keeps you hanging in there.

The piece that I enjoyed the most was Untitled001: Darkness Part1 in the Video Works section. I've always been a big fan of Super 8, ever since I was kid watching the family "cines". In this series of compositions professional designers combine the grainy aesthetic of Super 8 film with modern digital editing effects, adding some random experimentation for extra piquancy to create an arresting series.

The filmmakers explain the creative process succinctly: "This short film is an episodic experimental project focused on the theme of darkness. Twelve broadcast design studios and 10 composers collaborated to make 12 one-minute segments of a digital film. Each studio was provided with a camera, and the footage they shot was exchanged and edited to complete the project."

The pieces range from infernal to utopian projections of darkness. I should point out that I watched this over a 300k connection and so was able to get a reasonably good quality full-screen picture. Of course, there was still obvious pixellation. But that's the nature of the beast, and if anything for this particular work the webness of the video even adds to the experience.

So turn off the lights, turn up the volume and tune in...

Note: online festival viewers are encouraged to vote for the Online Audience Award, which will be announced March 5

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