FILMMAKING
It's not just production that has gone digital – movie planning, promotion, and even funding have entered the Net age. Take Groove, an indie film about the San Francisco rave scene that screened at Sundance in January and is aiming for general release later this year. The feature, written and directed by Greg Harrison and produced by Danielle Renfrew, raised about two-thirds of its capital from Internet entrepreneurs and relied heavily on the Web throughout production.
Groove is a decidedly low-budget project, made for less than a million dollars. And the Net significantly helped keep expenses down. Actors were hired online through Casting.com and by drawing on rave mailing lists. Taking a cue from recent indie hits 
and The Blair Witch Project, Groove is relying primarily on its Web site to communicate with investors, distributors, media, and fans. Viral promotion is written into the film's business plan.
Net investors include Brian Behlendorf, cofounder of Organic, author of Apache software, and founding CTO at Collab.Net; Michael Bayne, a systems architect from Go2Net; Critical Path software engineer Mike Wertheim; and Jeff Southard, cofounder of 415 Productions. Southard's multimedia studio provided the film's production staff with office space, site hosting (www.groove.415.com), phone lines, and email addresses. Southard is also Groove's executive producer.
"We're all spending time in the latest medium," says Southard, "but we still want to make a mark in a timeless one."
Particularly attractive to the webheads was the film's subject matter.
"There were certain aspects of the rave culture that the film really nailed," says Wertheim, who frequented raves when he ran a small electronic-music company during the early '90s. Wertheim, who contributed to postproduction costs after attending a private screening, says that because media coverage of raves has been so "hysterical," realism was crucial to the film's success.
If the new media-backed film turns out to be a hit, "net profits" may take on a whole new meaning in the film industry.
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