…Tiffany Shlain, whose Sundance documentary short on Jewish Americans, “The Tribe,” went up on iTunes on Oct. 2 — and quickly cracked the Top 10 shorts— said that iTunes had actually made it advantageous, in a way, to make short films.
“It’s one of these beautiful moments in time,” Ms. Shlain said. “People aren’t trained yet to download a feature and watch it” on their television, she added. “Most people are going to watch on their iPod or a computer. The technology really isn’t there yet to move it over to TV. And people are much more apt to download shorts, because of YouTube and iTunes.”
For filmmakers Apple offers a cookie-cutter deal that is generous on paper, compared with Hollywood norms: It charges just 30 cents on the dollar, while, with independent films, another 10 or 15 cents typically goes to an aggregator, or middleman, who converts a film into Apple’s format and accounts for the proceeds to the filmmaker. But Apple provides financial reports only every six months, aggregators note, and it’s safe to say that no one has gotten rich on an iTunes short film yet.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco filmmaker Tiffany Shlain‘s 18-minute film "The Tribe" has screened in 75 film festivals in the past 11/2 years, was given away for free on the Sundance Film Festival’s Web site for months and has been shown at numerous house parties and classrooms across the country. But when the multiple-award-winning film was offered for sale on iTunes a few weeks ago, it was the closest "The Tribe" came to a red-carpet theatrical premiere.
Since then, the online incarnation of "The Tribe" has been doing something few short films do: sell. At $1.99 a download, the independent film was the 10th-most popular film on the site as of Friday, behind a slew of animated shorts from Pixar and Disney.
Could new digital technology create a cultural moment for the short film – long an underappreciated form – to gain not only a wider audience, but also to kick a few bucks back to under-compensated filmmakers?
The answer seems to be yes. Creators of short films (40 minutes or less) have finally found an audience through such online sites as iTunes, Revver.com and San Francisco’s Frameline Films and Caachi.com, which specializes in distributing independent films. And those sites are even starting to bring a revenue trickle to older shorts that audiences are unearthing online.
