Movies Features | Tech

For roughly a decade now, record sales have been in free fall. And as Internet download speeds continue to accelerate, the film industry could follow suit.

Not everybody in film is looking at this transformation as a bad thing, though. For short films especially, the Internet means distribution and exposure on levels once only reached with professional promotion.

Stephen Webster realized this before most people. The head of marketing for the Vancouver Film School has spent the last several years giving away the school’s best work on YouTube.

“It has become a calling card for the students to get their feature up on our YouTube channel,” Webster told the Georgia Straight.

He began VFS’s experiment with the video-hosting Web site (and second-most-searched archive on the Internet) in March 2006. Less than four years later, Webster said, VFS has the most-followed YouTube channel of any educational institution in the world.

As of January 19, more than 37,000 people had subscribed to the channel, which hosts some 600 videos and has racked up over 26.5 million total upload views.

“Current students are pretty excited about it,” Webster added.

He explained that the benefits of distribution on YouTube became apparent back in 2006, when a student’s short film called “Piece of Mind”—a visual-effects piece—was promoted on YouTube’s home page. Webster said that what was most impressive was not the number of views the film subsequently received, but the comments it brought forth.

People asked how certain effects were created, what was involved in creating the film, and how its creative vision took shape. Webster and VFS subsequently brought Ori Ben-Shabat, the film’s creator, back into the studio and put his viewers’ questions to him.

“It allows you to engage your audience in a new and different and exciting way,” Webster emphasized.

Of course, higher levels of exposure do entail tradeoffs.

Filipino-American filmmaker H. P. Mendoza, like “any good narcissistic filmmaker” (his words), has Google Alerts set up that inform him whenever one of his films is mentioned on-line. When one such notification popped up last August, Mendoza clicked the link and was asked for US$39.99 to download a copy of “Fruit Fly”, a film he had screened at the 2009 Vancouver Queer Film Festival and that he believed was not available on-line.

Speaking from San Francisco, Mendoza said that he was initially angry about a third party attempting to profit from his work without consent. But his next thought was, “Who would pay $40 for a movie that they probably never even heard of?