So you wanna be in pictures? Pick up your tools and shoot.

By Rob Kenner

Until recently, filmmakers hoping to find a large audience were caught in a vicious circle: You can't make a movie without shelling out serious money for crew, gear, and film. Raising the cash requires signing away rights, schmoozing investors, or plunging into debt, all of which encourages artistic compromise or, at best, diverts attention from the creative task at hand. Now, suddenly, the cinematic landscape is changing. At the top of the heap, Hollywood moguls are finding themselves playing catch-up to digital billionaires in the power game; even the most entrenched among the studio elite have come to realize that "the future is the Internet," as one insider recently put. it. At the bottom of the heap, the change is equally radical. Microcinema, a new way of creating, distributing, and screening movies, is causing a major seismic rumble. Technical advances are driving this transformation in a way that is making movie production more accessible, personal, and spontaneous than ever before.

Film is the youngest art form, the one most reliant on technology. Arguably, inventions have shaped cinematic history just as much as directors, writers, and stars have. But every step of the way, each breakthrough - whether it was synchronized sound, color film, or motion-control effects - made onscreen magic more expensive. This time, it's different. Microcinema feeds on the widespread availability of affordable, portable image-capturing devices - but the technology is lowering cinema's entry fee, not raising it. In particular, prices of digital video cameras and desktop editing suites have plummeted in the last couple of years, demystifying and democratizing the world of moviemaking. What has been a costly and elaborate collaborative process is quickly becoming a one-person show.

Digital video is a big part of the microcinema boom. Do the math: To make a 20-minute celluloid short, you need a dozen 400-foot reels of 16-mm film at $150 each. Throw in processing fees of $22 per reel, spend a week in an editing office at $200 per hour, add another day in a sound lab, order a final print - and you're looking at a budget of more than $40,000 before you pay your cast and crew.

If you shoot the same picture on DV, 10 bucks buys you a single two-hour cassette that you can use over and over again. The camera - a Sony VX1000, say, or the popular Canon XL1 - costs about $4,000, comparable to the price of a professional film camera. There are no processing fees, and you edit at home on your G3 using a $700 software package like Adobe Premiere. So, for around $10,000 you can make as many movies as you want.

The term microcinema was coined in 1991 by San Francisco's Total Mobile Home Microcinema, where all the films are "underground" because they're shown in the basement. The founders say they envisioned an alternative movement, a sort of cinematic microbrewery, and the word has come to describe an intimate, low-budget style of movie shot on relatively cheap formats like Hi-8 video, DV, and (less often) older do-it-yourself stock like 16-mm film. It's a flexible term that can cover anything - animated shorts, bizarrely impressionistic video manipulations, hard-hitting documentaries, and garage-born feature-length movies. A classic microcinema offering is a film that probably would not exist if new technology hadn't allowed its creators to cut costs or inspired them to try something different. A good example is Silence, a short by Brent Sims and John A. Taylor that was featured at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Shot with a Nintendo Game Boy camera, the film is about a pianist dealing with the death of a loved one, cost $100, and looks raw but effective, oddly recalling the silent-film era.

Microcinema scenes are buzzing in San Francisco and Seattle and in the basements and back alleys of cities like New York, Baltimore, Houston, and Pittsburgh. The movement is thriving overseas as well, with the word spreading through light-speed information networks and old-fashioned word of mouth. (Eight years after it started, London's anarchist film club Exploding Cinema has branched out all over the UK and into Amsterdam.) The Internet binds this makeshift community together: Web sites like atomfilms.com, thebitscreen.com, and ifilm.net - devoted to streaming short films and bugged-out animation loops and more - are proliferating, as are online discussion groups. Increasingly, the Net is becoming a potent distribution channel and showcase. Because microcinema opens a direct connection between filmmakers and audience, for the first time in the 100-plus-year history of motion pictures average people can shoot, edit, and perhaps even disseminate their visions without answering to anybody.

Already the results are leaping out of the avant-garde and into the mainstream. Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 digital feature The Celebration has grossed more than $1 million in revenues. The Blair Witch Project, the summer's sleeper hit, was shot by its actors on little Hi-8 video and 16-mm film cameras. Produced for $40,000, this terrifying collage of "found" footage derives most of its power from its amateurish immediacy, and succeeded despite a peanuts marketing budget and because of a campaign that played out in part on the Net. Hollywood is still reeling from the Blair Witch phenomenon. By August the film's distributors were estimating it would eventually gross $150 million.

Every summer has its surprise hit, but if this sounds like a generic come-from-nowhere story, it's not. It's the beginning of next-generation moviemaking. Multiply The Blair Witch Project by a thousand, turbocharge it with the marketing, distribution, and screening potential of the Net, and one shooting star could become a meteor shower.

Like the Zapruder film, the Rodney King tape, and When Animals Attack, microcinema thrills by keeping it real. Boston-based filmmaker Todd Verow, who publicly predicted the death of celluloid at 1999's Sundance and the New York Underground Film Festival, is on pace to make 10 feature-length digital films by next year, each for less than $1,000. Traveling showcases like the D.Film Digital Film Festival draw ever larger followings. Responding to popular demand, New York University's undergraduate film and TV department has begun integrating DV into its curriculum. This year at Cannes, the program included several digitally produced titles, and DV booster Peter Broderick of the Independent Film Channel's Next Wave Films attracted an SRO crowd for a panel discussion and screening of clips of digital features.

"This is the difference between waiting and hoping that someday the financing will show up, and making the film now with creative control," Broderick told the assembled throng. "No more excuses!"

Outlaw images flicker across the muslin scrim hanging in Curtis Taylor's living room. This isn't your average theater - there's no popcorn or Jujyfruits, and the red velvet curtains framing the makeshift screen came from a thrift store. But the usual gathering place for Independent Exposure - a monthly screening of fringe film, video, and computer art that anchors Seattle's microcinema scene - closed down. When Taylor heard the news, he volunteered his home, which sits on a tidy block next to the Washington Communist Party's headquarters and two doors down from a chanting roomful of white-robed martial artists.

Tonight's program is billed as an All-Comedy Edition, though comedy seems like a relative term here. Onscreen, an unshaven middle-aged man is slapping his stepson around. The kid retaliates by pegging his abusive stepfather in the temple with a fastball and then running over his mother with a lawn mower. The audience - 50 or so independent filmmakers, computer programmers, artists, chefs, even a sheepish ad exec or two - squeals with delight. Next, Christ and his apostles hawk New Testament Wine Coolers in a cheerfully blasphemous ad shot in garish digital color.

Multiply The Blair Witch Project by a thousand, then turbocharge it with the marketing, distribution, and screening power of the Net.

Nasty, brutish, and short - three good ways to describe the fare at Independent Exposure, which, like the Seattle scene overall, is a vivid example of the creative energies at play in microcinema. Most of the titles at tonight's screening, like the 12-minute opus William Shatner Lent Me His Hairpiece (An Untrue Story), could use a bit of editing. But who'd have guessed they would ever get shown in the first place?

The evening's host is Joel Bachar, a wiry 31-year-old video artist and tireless microcinema promoter with a dark goatee and a sensibility to match. With little more than a used LCD video projector, two VCRs, and an email account, Bachar has built Blackchair Productions into a fixture of the global microcinema circuit. He mails hour-long compilation tapes to guerrilla film fests from Tacoma to Thailand, organizes screenings, and networks endlessly. "We just had a show in Belgrade," Bachar says. "Three hundred people turned up in a torrential downpour. Three days later the bombs started falling."

The Independent Exposure screenings are just one part of a stubborn subculture that's taken root here in the drizzly environs that nurtured garage uprisings like grunge and Microsoft. The Seattle-based cable-access show OffLine pumps a weekly dose of underground film and video to a purported 10 million viewers in 100 cities nationwide. The city's scene grew up around the 911 Media Arts Center, a nonprofit moving-image lab. A crucial source of cheap equipment and expertise, 911 also loans digital cameras and editing equipment to local schools. This spring the center gave nearby Garfield High a G3, a Canon XL1, and a FireWire connection - a state-of-the-art consumer production package that might retail for $6,000 or $7,000.

With even kids getting into the game, there's going to be a lot of footage to wade through, which is where grassroots gatekeepers like Joel Bachar come in. Like many a microcinemaphile, Bachar entered the loop out of sheer frustration. He migrated west from Massachusetts in 1990, when Hollywood and Northern Exposure were keeping Seattle's film professionals busy. When he wasn't doing production-assistant work, he made short ambient video pieces and submitted them to festivals. "I got nothing back," he recalls, "not even a rejection letter." He began soliciting work via email and cruising the Web to find kindred spirits.

By the mid-'90s, Seattle's big-budget film scene was slowing down. The X-Files had hopped the border to Vancouver, which was attracting more and more US productions with tax incentives and an appealing Canadian exchange rate. Seattle's upwardly mobile film talents headed there or moved to LA. Diehards like Bachar who stayed behind began creating their own projects - and their own venues to show them.

In 1996, Bachar started Independent Exposure in the backroom at the Speakeasy, a funky downtown cyberlounge and performance space maintained by a local ISP as a spot for computer nerds to get a little culture. His monthly screenings soon developed a rabid following - mostly aspiring filmmakers, plus a few seekers of cheap thrills - but the institution remains fragile. Last June, the Speakeasy shut down because the local liquor board had a problem with the number of teenagers who were stopping in to hear live music, check their email, and catch a weird flick. If his friend Curtis Taylor hadn't opened his living room at the last minute, Bachar might have canceled tonight's show.

"I didn't expect to make it this far," he says. "But it lives on - that's the important thing."

Except for the occasional arts grant or freelance PR gig, Bachar has no income to speak of. For a while last year, he had no apartment. He cruises the city streets in his beat-up yellow Subaru, stopping in at film events, dropping off flyers, making connections. Though he's been approached by content-hungry webcasters and DVD firms, many of them have found his collection a mite too edgy.

"Even when alternative music becomes mainstream and all the major studios have their independent divisions, there's always a need for a true alternative," he says. "I like to show things that are so low-fi or just so weird that there's no place for them. I get some backlash from the film snobs - you know, theater is a holy place and it's celluloid and all that. I just don't buy it. I don't think an oil painter would look down on a watercolorist."

Not that Bachar opposes making money. His business model involves developing a Web site (www.microcinema.com) that will serve as a road map to the world's underground film forums. "A lot of people look at independents as wannabes," he says. "They're seen as amateurs because they don't count in the economic structure of the industry. I have a real problem with that. Sorry, but we're the future."

OK, but can you make a living doing this? Mika Salmi of AtomFilms thinks so. Salmi, a strapping blond Finn who signed Nine Inch Nails to its first record deal, has attracted more than $4 million in backing for his company, a production and distribution outfit that offers online access to short films and digital media. AtomFilms also produces original animation and has drawn a variety of big-time investors, including Warner Bros. Online and former Universal boss Frank Biondi. "Traditionally, there hasn't been a standard venue for short films," says Salmi, "but people definitely want to see them."

Although AtomFilms occupies the more corporate end of the microcinema spectrum, "corporate" doesn't exactly mean highbrow. In the company's airy Seattle loft HQ, one of the first things chief marketing officer Matt Hulett shows guests is a Flash animation called Micro Gerbil 2000. In it, a crusty cartoon critter is tossed in a microwave, where he points to his crotch and curses. You click on the microwave's controls, his eyes pop out, and he fries.

"It's the most popular thing on our site," Hulett says sheepishly. "We can't get rid of it." Another animation on the site, Fishbar, consists of two good-sized salmon - bitmapped photos of actual salmon, not drawings - wearing porkpie hats and conversing in beer-soaked old-man slang.

"For $1,500 you can have your own TV station and broadcast it globally. That's insane!"

The Fishbar series was produced just a few blocks away from Atom at a little shop of horrors known as Honkworm International, founded two years ago by 35-year-old former Microsoft exec Johan Liedgren and 26-year-old computer-game designer Noah Tannen. Their bizarre two- to three-minute clips are as weird as any other microcinema fare, with a few crucial differences: They're even shorter, sharply written, and extremely profitable.

Honkworm will gross more than $1 million this year by selling corporate sponsorships for its oddball animations, which appear on the Web sites of RealNetworks, Macromedia, ShockRave, Apple, QuickTime, Microsoft, Playboy, HotWired, Snap!, and Broadcast.com. "We actually have several hundred thousand people in 90 countries logging on to our site every month," says Liedgren in a tone somewhere between awe and gratitude.

It all started innocently enough. Two smart, somewhat geekish fellows decided to quit their jobs and tell stories on the Web. They wrote a script whose dialogue consisted of nonsensical blather about evil babies and ham sandwiches, and then bought a copy of Flash digital video-editing software. "Neither of us had any real production experience," recalls Tannen, who sits, bathed in the eerie glow of a big neon JESUS SAVES sign, in Honkworm's wood-and-exposed-brick office. "OK, we needed pictures of fish. So we bought a $200 digital camera and I went down to the market, and I'm standing there just taking pictures of the fish in the ice. The guys at the market were like, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'I'm making animation.'"

They brought the fish shots home, added hats and scenery, and made a cartoon. Tannen submitted the first Fishbar to MTV's Cartoon Sushi, where it aired in late 1997. Traffic picked up on Honkworm's Web site, and the phones started ringing.

"Budweiser called us up and said, 'We really like your stuff,'" recalls Liedgren, who cuts a rather cartoonish figure himself with his narrow head and round-lensed glasses. "And we said, 'Well, buy it.'" Because the brewery was a little skittish about attracting 12-year-olds to its Web site, Liedgren called some of his contacts at Yahoo! and Excite about posting the films on their sites instead, with Budweiser paying for '50s-style ad announcements at the end of each short ("This show was brought to you by the King of Beers").

"Everyone's happy now," he says. "Excite really needed streaming content, because that's an expensive proposition for them to do themselves. Now they don't have to pay, because Budweiser's sponsoring it."

While some microcinema practitioners express an adversarial attitude toward the mainstream, Honkworm is raking in cash with creative control and a clean conscience. "We were surprised at how easy it was," Tannen says. "It's too good to be true that companies will pay us to do whatever we want, right? That can't happen." Now they turn down clients just to keep pace with demand.

Honkworm is in talks with MTV to develop a series or a feature film, and sponsors are approaching them about producing TV commercials with their $300 Flash software. "For about 1,500 bucks you can have your own TV station, and broadcast it globally - that's insane!" says Tannen, punching his laptop with glee. "The fact is that you don't have to go to Disney on your hands and knees with a script, and say, 'Please show this to people in Tibet.' The power is totally in your hands. In Hollywood people would be like, 'You want to have fish in a bar? That's stupid. You'll never sell that.'"

Liedgren adds: "Disney and all those guys are trying so hard to make something that'll work online and they're just failing over and over and over again. They're still thinking broadcast, but there's a different idea that's driving things now. The question is, Why would I click on that? But none of this has dawned on them yet. Long-term, the fish will kick Mickey Mouse's ass."

Across town sits Mark O'Connell, who thinks the commercial prospects of digital images are pretty much beside the point. A postcard on the wall of his two-bedroom apartment reads: YOUR TELEVISION IS ALREADY DEAD. On his floor sits a pile of videotapes with labels like "Twisted Sex Trailers #14," "Fractals," and "Elvis." A 45-year-old former rock guitarist who spent the '80s gigging around Los Angeles, O'Connell became fascinated with the creative possibilities of digital in 1990. He spent every penny he had on a home editing system - a Radius capture card, Adobe Premiere and Photoshop, and a Macintosh 840AV with a 40-MHz processor. "I was just obsessed," he says. "I needed the tools, and I went bankrupt getting them."

After filing for Chapter 11, he spent hour after hour cruising the TV dial with his VCR poised to record whatever caught his eye. He picked up other fodder at a video store that carried works from Something Weird, a local business that recycles discarded celluloid and was once a hub for testing and distributing Hollywood releases. When he accumulated enough tape, he'd dump selected clips onto his 3-Gbyte hard drive and start messing around.

First he'd distort and combine images in Photoshop, then drag them into Premiere and organize them along a timeline with cuts, wipes, and dissolves. Then he'd add a soundtrack of his own composition before rendering the whole thing. A single rendering, however, sometimes took two or three days - thanks to a local arts grant, he bought a G3 and new software last year.

O'Connell's dark, multilayered QuickTime files veer from the curiously beautiful to the grotesquely surreal. In Top Story Tonight, the heads of network news anchors melt and fuse like wax-museum figures in a fire, accompanied by a menacing hodgepodge of sound-bite drivel.

"I'm looking for that special thing, that odd thing that happens when you take an image and process it and reprocess it and reprocess it again," he says. "If you gave me $10,000 to re-create one of these effects, I probably couldn't do it."

When he's finished manipulating, he dumps the finished piece to video or burns it onto a CD. (A recent retrospective, dipstick, debuted at Seattle's Howard House gallery last summer.) In 1996, he emailed one of his works to the Edinburgh Film Festival on a 28.8 modem. "They said I was the first filmmaker ever to do that," he says, laughing.

O'Connell hates being called a filmmaker, and, in fact, his early works were done without a camera. He created his trippy, subversive video pieces using nothing but a VCR and his Macintosh editing suite. "Filmmaking is totally collaborative," he says. "You used to need an army of specialists to do everything. But digital video is much easier and more direct. Now it's something that really is the result of one author."

But even as major studios and film festivals begin to embrace DV, O'Connell thinks its most enticing artistic possibilities lie outside the mainstream. "DV is not film; it's multiple frames of digital information - what can we do with it that's actually new? Hollywood and TV have a very definite way of organizing visual information. It's ingrained in us. How do we even imagine the possibilities outside of that context?"

What O'Connell aches for is a true breakthrough, a decisive moment when digital imagery undergoes something akin to hip hop's completely new approach to music making. He believes the digital image will soon replace the sound sample just as turntables replaced electric guitars as a signature of cool.

"When we were kids," he says, "we were gonna be in a rock-and-roll band and make a record. Now you can make something that holds all these layers of media. I can't imagine people not taking advantage of that. Some 16-year-old will apply the mentality of trip hop to imagery and it'll knock people on their heads. We're still waiting for the Jimi Hendrix of digital media to come along."

Or he may be out there now, getting ready to upload.

Rob Kenner wrote about the MP3 strategies of major record labels in Wired 7.08.

