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APRIL 14, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 14 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
Move over celluloid. Directors are going digital By YASMIN GHAHREMANI Acclaimed Singaporean director Eric Khoo is accustomed to completing projects without the backing of a major studio, but his latest film is low-budget in the extreme. Khoo's quirky 15-minute short, titled Home VDO, was shot on a store-bought video camera for $9. The only agent involved was alcohol. "I got my friends to act for me," says Khoo, best known for 12 Storeys, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997. "I told them, 'I can buy you a beer but that is about it.' " Production values be hanged. Home VDO is among a host of digital movies being created on a shoestring expressly for screening on the Internet - a medium that is bending the genre of the experimental movie while offering an alternative to Hollywood's studio-centric economics. By posting directly on the Net, less bankable directors are finding they can drastically lower production costs yet still reach audiences, completely bypassing the tightly controlled distribution channels and movie houses of conventional filmmaking. Online viewership may be small today, but new websites are rapidly forming to try to tap the emerging genre's potential. In the U.S., Atomfilms.com, ifilm.com and the upcoming Leonardo DiCaprio online film festival (immodestly named Leofest.com) all serve as both laboratory and showcase for Internet-based filmmakers. Khoo's project is part of Asia's first online film festival, 8arts.com. Created by Asiacontent.com and coordinated by the Singapore International Film Festival, the 8arts.com website goes live on April 7. The low cost barriers are a blessing for Asia. While India, Hong Kong and Japan have healthy commercial movie industries, directors in Crisis-hit Southeast Asian countries have been sidelined by lack of funding. Indonesia in the 1970s saw the release of up to 100 films a year; last year there were six. "A whole group of well-known filmmakers have not made a film in years now because there's just no money," says Aruna Vasudev, the president of Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema. Of course, there is no money in Internet movies, either, at least not now. Nobody pays to see them online, and there is no cut of concession receipts when the popcorn machines belong to members of the audience. But the Net can offer independent directors a venue free of distributors who - with their eyes on the bottom line - decide what audiences will see. "It really democratizes the whole thing, from production to distribution," says Filipino director Amable "Tikoy" Aguiluz. Others use a different political term to describe Net filmmaking. "It is part of the new public anarchy," says Garin Nugruho, a respected Indonesian director. He is working on a short film for 8arts that compares the religious violence in Aceh province today to that of the 1965 anti-communist purges. In fact, the current situation in Aceh is so dangerous that his crew has had to stop shooting the film for now. But when it's finished, Nugruho hopes it will be part of a more open political discourse. "We can use the Internet as a channel to discuss everything that has never come out to the public before," he says. For all the advantages, Internet video technology is primitive, and directors have to work within myriad constraints. Surfers won't wait for large files to download, nor will they sit passively in front of their computers for hours. Net films must be short, 15 minutes or less. Too, fancy cinematic techniques are lost in pixilated images that flicker jerkily on monitors inside a frame little bigger than a playing card. As a result, the medium is driving the auteur's message as well as the aesthetic. The poor picture quality calls for a grittier style. Khoo built the story line for Home VDO around a deliberately shaky shooting technique. The result is a witty look at Singapore, as seen through the viewfinder of a handicam held by two very different characters. One is an American tourist on vacation with his family, the other a local Chinese who steals the camera from him. "We were just making something work for the medium," says Khoo. With little investment capital at risk, directors are free to take chances on the material. Aguiluz is working on a five-minute documentary about aging Filipino immigrants who moved to San Francisco some 75 years ago. He shot the project on a 1982 Fisher Price toy camera purchased for $400 through eBay. "People were staring at me in the streets while I was shooting," he laughs. But Aguiluz liked the ghostly black and white images the oddball device creates when it records moving pictures on conventional audio-cassette tapes. "This is an obsolete camera," he says. "It's a farewell to analog. I thought it would be a perfect metaphor for this group [of immigrants] that's vanishing." He plans to put the finished product on Korea's Indiekino.com, another Internet film site launching later this year. Animation abounds on the Web. Of the 15 titles on the 8arts site, nearly half are animated works. That's because the simple files download faster and look better than live-action films. And since most animation is done on computers anyway these days, it's easy to transfer to the Internet. "We will see an explosion of animation, of different genres and styles appearing on the web," says Yang Tien, deputy manager of the Feature Animation department at Nanyang Polytechnic University. "Many will be bedroom animators doing it for fun just to make a statement apart from the professionals. It becomes more vibrant and richer as a result." Asia's fragmented audiences may not be ready for online films, since Internet penetration remains low in most countries. But there is talk of establishing surfing cinemas where people can pay to attend online film festivals in a computer café atmosphere. And filmmakers are heartened by the popularity of MP3 music sites, where digital recordings are sold and traded over the Web. "The music and film community are quite symbiotic," says Philip Cheah, director of the Singapore film festival. "The same people who are able to download MP3 will be in a position to download the video files." That will only happen if more people have access to broadband Internet connections capable of transmitting high-quality video. Millions of Asian homes are expected to be wired for broadband over the next several years. Those advances could make today's crude online productions the silent films of the Internet age. In the meantime, organizers are trying to seed demand by setting up digital media sites in conjunction with conventional film festivals around the region. CineManila, which takes place in July, will probably be the next. "A lot of the Internet is reinvention," says Cheah. "In many ways, digital film is about going back to the beginnings of cinema, when [audiences] were viewing shorts. History just keeps turning around." The medium's directorial pioneers can hope that history will eventually repeat itself at the box office, too. With reporting by Alexandra Seno Write to Asiaweek at mail@web.asiaweek.com
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