Stand By Your Guns simultaneously glorifies and vilifies the handgun, masquerading as a children's fun center online. View Slideshow 
The web film is dead! Long live films on the web!
That's one way to read a shift in strategy by the Sundance Online Film Festival, or SOFF, which launches Thursday. Created in 2001, the festival's initial mission was to nurture the web-only movie, which the Sundance programming team predicted would become an art form unto itself.
Five years later, the Sundance staff has decided that made-for-the-web movies aren't yet ready for prime time. So instead of showcasing content designed for computer screens, the 2005 SOFF features the same short films being premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The actual fest runs through Jan. 30 in Park City; the virtual one is up through June.
On the one hand, the new SOFF format is exciting news: Anyone with a computer can watch some of the world's best new short films. But SOFF's makeover also suggests that made-for-the-web films haven't evolved as quickly as expected.
"There weren't that many new voices in web films that were right for us," said Sundance programming chief John Cooper, whose team chose 82 short films from the more than 3,600 submitted this year. "A lot of them were one-joke films.
"Those work well on the web -- like everyone else, I watch them, I laugh, I send them on. But there wasn't as many films out there of a certain caliber as I thought there would be."
Since the web wasn't giving birth to enough high-quality films, Cooper decided to inject some Sundance movies into the system. Online film viewers can consider themselves fortunate: They'll see, for free, 33 of the same short films that Park City audiences pay top dollar to watch.
How do the filmmakers feel about Sundance giving their films away? About 50 -- more than half -- opted out of the SOFF. But others were happy to venture online with Sundance. Tom Putnam took the leap, even though web users will watch his Broadcast 23 in a two-by-three-inch box, and the horror spoof was intended for movie screens nearly 100 times that size.
On the computer, Broadcast 23 is as pixelated and as jittery as any piece of amateur Flash. Movie buffs will probably think it looks and sounds, well, kind of crappy.
"Online definitely isn't the optimum screening venue," said Putnam, whose Tom Hits His Head is available at AtomFilms. "I'd rather someone see it in a theater on a 120-foot-screen with the surround sound cranked and the subwoofer booming instead of on a little window on their monitor at work while their boss is yelling at them from across the hall. But the reality is that 99.9 percent of the people who see the film online wouldn't see it at all otherwise."
Though Brett Simon shot The Sailor's Girl in 35 mm, he also had no hesitation about showing it at the SOFF.
"Short films only live in two places: festivals and online," he said. "Short films can't demand to be wined and dined and taken to an expensive hotel. They should take it anywhere they can get it."
The treatment of Simon's and Putnam's works is an example of Sundance's shrinking of films, but the festival also is proving that web films can jump to the big screen. The Flash film Terminal Bar won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize in 2003, and Jason Rayles' Fair is included in this year's program.
Being in the actual film festival is "a little nerve-wracking" for Rayles, who worries that Fair won't necessarily translate to a theater.
"I created my movie with the web audience in mind and the look is informed by that," Rayles said, but added that he thinks the web has made audiences more open to varying styles of movies.
As in years past, the SOFF will showcase interactive media. Forest View uses toys to explore notions of utopia and perfection, Julia 1926 is a haunting meditation on Alzheimer's disease, and Stand By Your Guns offers a creepy collage of firearms-related games and movie clips.
Before deciding to revamp its online festival, Sundance consulted with a number of web-film experts from Pixar Animation Studios, the Independent Television Service and Yahoo Movies, along with AtomFilms. Though now in theory a competitor with SOFF, Atom's Scott Roesch hopes Sundance's new online presence will help legitimize web films.
"The new strategy brings the web viewer that much closer to the 'real' Sundance experience," said Roesch, Atom's vice president of marketing. "It will make Sundance's online operation an increasingly important part of the festival."
So maybe the SOFF won't hurt the online film channels. But won't it undermine the Sundance festival? Once Sundance starts putting more content online, will the actual event seem less special?
Cooper doesn't think so. Besides, he said, getting these short films to larger audiences fits Sundance's mission
"The experience in Park City is at its brink. It's expensive, there are no tickets, it's a small town," he said. "And it's frustrating to find great stuff and have the only people see it be the 400 people in the theater in Park City.
"I don't think the online festival will take away from the Park City experience. But if it does, so be it. (Festival founder) Robert Redford thinks like this, too. The question will be, 'How can you take this thing that is Sundance to a less elite audience while continuing to celebrate the filmmakers?'"
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