Six young filmmakers are taking a novel route in their pursuit of becoming Hollywood big shots: They're each taking turns sitting in the director's chair, creating stories for Internet streaming. The aspiring directors have banded together to run a Web site, Director Unknown, which streams short episodic films made by the small crew. For each episode, one member of the group gets the director's chair, while the others agree to do the rest of the work - the casting, the camera work, and other heavy lifting. The director of each episode, as the name suggests, stays secret.
"We've taken the 'auteur' out of film-making," jokes Alan Bell, a director who runs the Web site. The anonymity is partly a function of the site's purpose: to provide an outlet as well as a learning experience without wrecking anyone's pocketbook or marriage. He calls it "film school for adults."
Bell's day-job as a film editor means he gets a chance to mix with plenty of industry types. From his perspective, most struggling directors are setting themselves up for disappointment.
"Many people make shorts or even features out of their own pockets, sometimes even putting their homes up for mortgage," says Bell. Most of those directors never make any money at all, let alone make it big. "The film you made ends up with a very small audience. What's worse you're broke and thinking, 'How can I make another?'"
The episodes on Director Unknown, by contrast, each run from three to seven minutes, and are given working budgets of US$150. The site saves money by calling on the diverse skills of the group as actors, writers, location scouts, and even musical composers. Of course, given the budget, the work is fairly raw - production values run more toward Russ Meyers rather than Steven Spielberg. But the group members get a chance to polish their skills while pushing the medium and mapping out some Internet territory in anticipation of future developments.
"In the next decade TV and the Internet will converge. It's going to happen," says Bell. "The question is this: Is it going to be the same ol' shit we get off the TV?"
Even if it's the same old shit, it going to have to be lit a lot better. During the time the project has been going the group has discovered some difficult realties about shooting for a 2-inch screen. For instance, lighting can be surprisingly tough. If an object isn't lit strongly and directly, the compression that the video is put through will wipe out any trace of visibility.
Another lesson that Director Unknown has learned is that, when only one episode runs per month, it needs to be as provocative as possible to draw people back. Consequently, no holds are barred in terms of nudity and strong language. That approach has paid off with a small group of fans, most of whom have found the site through surfing and word of mouth. Bell is pleased but a little perplexed by the relative popularity of Director Unknown in such distant lands as the United Arab Emirates. "Every time I look, I see that someone from the Emirates has been on," watching the video. Bell estimates that around a hundred people visit the site a day.
Currently showing is the fourth episode of an LA murder mystery, Becoming Better People. Perhaps it's the naked corpse, or the unsavory, outspoken characters that are drawing viewers from lands with stricter codes of censorship.
Next September, on the first anniversary of the show, the site will offer a videotape of all the episodes. Bell says he'd consider other methods of distribution, but that he hasn't thought too much about it.
But once these unknown directors have gotten the knack of producing the 2-inch movie, can they sustain the transition back to a 32-inch TV screen?
