Tuning in to the Web

Online video comes of age

by MICHAEL CITROME

Over the last year or so, there's been an explosion in the popularity of online video. Web sites offering streaming movies and television have been springing up everywhere, and with the current popularity of high-speed Net connections, they're more accessible to more people than ever.

Most sites stream video using RealNetworks' Real Player, a free download at www.real.com/player. Other sites use Apple QuickTime or Microsoft Media Player, and will direct you to the proper spot to download a plugin if it's not already installed on your system.

One of the longest running movie sites on the Web is Hotbot's Animation Express, which serves as a showcase for underground animators. Almost all of the short films featured on Animation Express are computer animated, and many are presented using Macromedia Shockwave, blurring the line between film and video game by incorporating interactivity. Award-winning short films include Naoki Mitsuse's Sex Slave series.

Feature films

If feature films are what you desire, the best place to start is the broadband section of Yahoo! Broadcast (www.broadcast. com/broadband). This site is quite simply phenomenal. A huge archive of video, Yahoo! Broadcast offers titles ranging from classic Westerns to 50s b-movie sci-fi. There are also videos from Canadian punk band SNFU as well as many other indie bands. On a further indie tip, the Independent Films section of the site hosts a number of quirky and obscure indie films that probably aren't available elsewhere, and are worth checking out, especially Boulder Daze, a silly hipster film from, of all places, Boulder, Colorado.

For an entirely different selection of independent films, check out CinemaNow

(www.cinemanow.com), a site that not only hosts video, but also discussion boards on film festivals and various other aspects of filmmaking. Some of the American titles available for free include The Doom Generation and Whore, and there's also a large selection of Hong Kong films including Wing Chun, featuring Michelle Yeoh with stunts directed by Yuen Woo Ping, the man behind the zero gravity Kung Fu in The Matrix.

Fan parodies

Fan parodies are another entire category of indie film on the Net. The best-known fan parody film is Troops, a take-off of the Fox TV series Cops, with the officers of the law replaced by Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars. Completely fan-created and hosted, the film can be seen in its entirety at www.theforce.net/troops.

As if replacing American cops with Stormtroopers wasn't enough, a group of fans in Georgia decided to combine Star Wars with Kevin Smith's seminal indie film Clerks. The result, no doubt inspired by the "carpenters on the Death Star" conversation in Clerks, is Trooper Clerks. With Jersey-ites replaced by Imperial troops and droids, Trooper Clerks is just plain surreal. Plus, as art imitates life, there's now a Trooper Clerks animated episode. See it all at www.studiocreations.com/trooperclerks.

Net programming

For more programming produced exclusively for the Net, be sure to log on to The Pseudo Online Network (www.pseudo.com). Pseudo is home to about a dozen channels, which are actually Web sites that offer live video, but also discussion boards, chat rooms and radio broadcast. There's music, including channels devoted to urban styles, dance music and hip hop, as well as video games, with live reports from the recent E3 video game trade show. Plus many other channels devoted to topics ranging from theatre to computer hacking.

Pseudo is just one of the many Internet TV networks hoping to take eyeballs and dollars away from broadcast and cable TV. Other networks include DEN (www.den.net), a youth-oriented network, heavy on sitcoms and dramas, which launched last summer.

With more and more video sites launching, it's just a matter of time before the Web rivals cable or the video store as a source for movies. :