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Pretty soon, though, that won't be enough. And that's the one, colossal bummer about this new digital democracy: you probably need more money than ever just to tell people where to find you. The only way the do-it-yourselfers can get themselves noticed when they're up against the giant marketing power of the studios is through viral marketing--which works if your stuff gets people so excited that they e-mail it to two friends, who each in turn e-mail it to two friends, who each e-mail it to two more friends. This works particularly well for a new art form that's blossoming on the Net: sudden narrative. Like the early experiments in film, sudden narratives consist of quick visual bites that are perfect for today's limited technology and attention spans. Twenty-second-long cartoons--like those on Doodie.com or the one with the cabaret-singing alien doing I Will Survive who gets killed by a falling disco ball--now get e-mailed around the way Seinfeld jokes were once exchanged at the water cooler.
The most watched video clip of the past few months, for instance, is a parody of the Budweiser "Wassup?" ads. The Net spoof (which you can see at www.adcritic.com features the Superfriends. While the author is listed as "Unknown," the bit was actually created by a sitcom writer from That '70s Show, Phillip Stark, 27, and animator Graham Robertson, 26. Now they're trying to leverage it as a pitch for a sitcom about superheroes hanging around and whining like Friends characters. They're not pitching it to Hollywood studios, though; they're actually going on a pitch meeting to the website Shockwave.com "In Hollywood right now, if you take a section of the [Interstate] 405 and freeze-frame it," Stark says, "everybody is in their car scratching their chins and thinking the same thing: 'How can I use the Internet to my advantage?'"
Another way is through a slightly longer video format, otherwise known as the short film--a form that the Oscars recognize but the public doesn't. That's already changing online. All the buying at the Sundance Film Festival this year was done not by the big studios but by websites that show short, downloadable films, hoping to be the online Miramax or, better yet, to be bought by Miramax. Throughout the weeklong event, AtomFilms.com drove a slow-moving RV equipped with a television for aspiring directors to use to screen their short films, in the hope of getting purchased by the site. Bad films were dropped off at the end of Main Street, like some chase-scene version of The Gong Show.
AtomFilms shows movies like the parody Saving Ryan's Privates free on the Internet but hopes to distribute them everywhere. That's the beauty of digital media: content can be diced up and repackaged in any conceivable way and shown anywhere, from airplanes to elevators. In the future, there will be no boredom.