Short Film Context - Part 5

The short film context part 5 Online Screening Video Blog post format Online screening is a large part of a shorts life because yet again it’s another audience for them to tap in to. It’s incredibly useful for them to gain some free or relatively cheap exposure. For example most sites that screen shorts online such as BBC, Film4, Virgin Media, FutureShorts and Lovefilm to say a few, all stream their films and they tend to cater to lots of different needs. They have multiple genres such as; drama, animation, documentary, comedy, thriller and many more but they have an ultimate range to choose from and they are all mainly uploaded or sent in for free by the creator or the creator pays a small fee for it to be hosted and shown. This means that the creator has to establish a connection between them and their chosen exhibitor. This relationship can be established in many different ways, such as free hosting on youtube, or paid for hosting or submitted it to a competition; they have developed a working relationship. Then there’s the whole actual online audience, which could range from anyone at any age, although it would mainly be late teens upward so it would include students studying film and then film fans and occasionally some critics and persons of the film industry if a film garners enough ‘buzz’, granted some films or services may require a payment, for example filmmakers uploading whole films to youtube can charge a fee to watch it, and lovefilm and other services charge a subscription fee monthly. To actually get these films on their sites is rather easy, but the catch is you have to actually have a good film, that meets all their criteria and gets in before their deadlines and obviously pay any fees if required to. Although you must be picky about which site to upload to, like some sites have moderation which is put in to help you, like BBC recommends that you don’t upload before trying film festivals first, where as some sites just accept it if it meets their criteria, without thinking about where your film could go before their site. When these sorts of sites offer shorts against features, it is implying that they have a choice, and that this short could be considered up in the ranks with that specific feature, plus it gets them more exposure because they use scripts such as ‘related videos’ so if a short is related to the feature they will tend to watch the same sort of thing they are interested in. Overall the layout of all these sites tends to be exactly the same, with a tabs bar taking you to different pages, a drop down menus, and all the shorts having screenshots as their picture/poster, but it is effective in the way that they are easy and simple, which means accessibility and location is easily available for the viewer. Which helps the audience potential because they can easily pinpoint what they like dislike and access what they want to, plus the exposure is unlimited, I mean the internet has pages alive for years so these films will be accessible for many, many years.