AtomFilms wants to spread its shorts around the world

Like your mother, AtomFilms is demanding to know: Where do these shorts go?

Increasingly, they're going on the Internet, and to www.atomfilms.com, the Seattle-based site at the epicenter of an explosion of new filmmakers using the Web to get exposure for their work. Atom - whose motto is "Get into our shorts" - is wheeling and dealing to find venues for its catalog of 1,400 films, not to mention an art form that's languished for a generation.

The shorts are also going to Bumbershoot's 1 Reel Film Festival, which Atom is sponsoring this year. About 20 of its own animated and live-action titles will be among the festival's roughly 100 short-attention-span offerings.

Where else?

Malls. Elevators. Hand-held electronics. Cable TV. Maybe even movie theaters again, just like the old days. Matt Hulett, Atom's chief marketing and online officer, has a vision of shorts scattered everywhere.

"It's now my goal to take `M # A # S # H' reruns off all airline video screens," Hulett says.

And Atom's certainly got a pile to draw from. Here are the numbers:

AtomFilms now owns the rights to the 1,450 films accessible on its site, and 75 percent of them are viewed on any given day, Hulett says. The site gets about 3 million hits a month, and has 1.5 million registered users called "Atom Insiders" who can vote and comment on the material.

The site's most popular stuff is the kind of edgy material that always seems to find a home on the Internet first. Topping the animated charts are "Survivor" spoofs - a number of which depict cathartic punishment for smarmy host Jeff Probst - and "Angry Kid," naughty-mouthed stop-motion fun from the "Wallace and Gromit" folks. Live-action audience favorites include the "Bikini Bandits" series, and an 8-minute Spielberg spoof called "Saving Ryan's Privates."

The company, which launched in 1998, reports its revenues come from syndication fees and distribution of its films, online advertising and sponsorships. A small amount of revenue - about 10 percent - also comes from e-commerce sales of DVDs and VHS compilations.

And it won't be long before the story of AtomFilms won't fit into a short subject. The burgeoning company occupies the third floor of an unmarked building at 815 Western Ave., as well as satellite offices now in London, New York and Los Angeles.

In those offices, Atom staffers have by turns laughed and suffered through 60,000 submissions to find the 1,400 they've put online, by Hulett's reckoning. Because of increasingly affordable computers and film-editing software, Hulett says, "It's really easy now to create an inexpensive, high-quality film - and that's good news and bad news."

So who's watching this stuff? Typically males between 18 and 40, and "media junkies looking for new experiences," Hulett says.

The Internet film trend is tough to quantify and only a fool would try to predict its future, says Steve Shaviro, a professor in the University of Washington's cinema-studies program. Other major contenders include Icebox.com and Urban Entertainment (www.urbanentertainment.com), but there are now hundreds of film sites.

Shaviro admits he's seen only a fraction of cyberspace's vast film archive. Its quality is varied, just as with films in general. "There's some great, some boring. Having more available isn't going to guarantee good quality, but it's better than having limited choice."

Like many aficionados, Shaviro believes short films are a perfectly viable art form in and of themselves. "There's no particular reason why a film should be an hour and a half long, plus or minus a few minutes. There are lots of things people can do at different lengths."

But on a pragmatic level, the mini-flicks have also always served as calling cards for artists trying to move up in the entertainment business. While they are paid various sums for the rights to their work, there's not big money in it.

Seattle actor Ken Boynton's witty live-action piece, "William Sexpeare's Much Ado About Puberty" - which he wrote, directed and stars in - played the 1 Reel fest in 1998, and is now on the Atom site along with its companion piece, "William Psychspeare's Taming of the Shrink."

"I signed with them because I thought they had the best shot at doing something people were going to notice," Boynton says.

Boynton shot "Much Ado" in 16 hours on a Sunday for $2,500, with friends who worked for free.

And while having his stuff on Atom hasn't gotten him his Big Break, it has generated some nibbles from employers and some small job offers.

"It's still bigger to say `My film went to Sundance' than to say `My film's on AtomFilms.' But I notice more and more, people are saying, `Oh really? I go there all the time! I'll check it out.' "