Short Shelf Life: Why Put Animated Shorts on DVD?
But it can be difficult to stand out in the crowded DVD section. "The number of releases is astonishing," he says. "We're just testing the market. Does it make sense? Is there an audience?" Early results seem to show there is, May reports. It helps that the theatrical festival lends publicity to the DVD and provides a core base of potential customers.
Other film festivals that have released DVDs over the years include the 25-year-old Spike & Mike Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation; The Sundance Festival; and Resfest, a globally touring festival now in its 10th year, among others.
For the last two years, Magnolia Pictures, in conjunction with U.K.-based Shorts International, has toured a film festival to show each year's Oscar-nominated shorts (live-action and animated) in theaters prior to Academy Awards night. It has released companion DVDs, as well as airing a version of the festival on its sister cable network HDNet. This year's DVD includes 2006 nominees The Danish Poet, Lifted, The Little Matchgirl, Maestro and No Time for Nuts, as well as five additional animated shorts from the U.S. and Australia, including Blur Studios' A Gentleman's Duel, Branscome International's Guide Dog (directed by Bill Plympton), Charlex Films' One Rat Short, Chris Jones's The Passenger and Adam Parrish King's Wraith of Cobble Hill.
Internet Initiatives
At one time, many Internet destinations focusing on animated and live-action entertainment announced that DVD distribution would be a key way to expand the audience for their short content and generate an additional income stream for creators. But, since then, the DVD landscape has become ever more crowded, increased broadband penetration has made the online viewing experience accessible to and enjoyable for a wider audience, and new technologies such as mobile entertainment and podcasting have provided a viable alternative to DVD. For all these reasons, Internet-origin content is a rarity on DVD today.
In 2000, AtomFilms was one of the first online entertainment venues to come out with a series of DVDs. "We were a little bit ahead of the curve," says Megan O'Neill, Atom Ent.'s vp of acquisitions and production. "It was before DVDs were widely accepted and before short films were a cultural phenomenon." Furthermore, the site's business model evolved as technology allowed more people to watch entertainment online. Around 2002, O'Neill says, "We became less of a distributor and more of an online broadcaster." She notes that some of the shorts available on AtomFilms are included on compilation DVDs released by other companies. Game Over by PES, which was financed by AtomFilms Studio, the company's in-house content-development arm, is slated for one of the Animation Show DVDs, for example.
Atom also had a deal with CustomFlix, announced in 2004, whereby users could select from 125 films in Atom's collection to build a customized, high-quality compilation DVD to purchase through CustomFlix.com. While that partnership has ended, O'Neill believes the "create-your-own" concept is a good one. Although some people will always want to have their own collections of shorts on DVD, "I think most people will want to curate their collection themselves and watch it on whatever device they choose," she says. AtomFilms currently makes some of its films available for purchase at Atom to Go, which allows customers to download films for later viewing on multiple devices.
Web-based entertainment is more likely to find its way to DVD when a feature-length film is made from the property rather than as a compilation; the original webisodes often are included as extras. Examples range from Queer Duck: The Movie, originally conceived as a webisode on Icebox.com, to releases such as Broken Saints, an online Flash-animated graphic novel that unfolded over a three-year period and was released as a made-for-DVD feature film by 20th Century Fox Home Ent. in spring 2006.
Habbo.com, the online social networking community for teens, commissioned several studios around the world in 2005 to create three-minute animated webisodes that would translate the Habbo experience to the realm of traditional entertainment. Originally, the plan was to compile these onto DVD for retail distribution, potentially followed by a television series. However, the company's animation strategy has changed over the last two years. In January 2007, it announced a partnership with Lionsgate for a 14-day contest in which its members would vote on which of 10 commissioned animated shorts they thought would make the best feature film. Lionsgate and Habbo said they would consider the winner for a possible movie to be released by Lionsgate both online and on DVD.
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