We are proposing to begin with, that there are three basic types of film content on the Internet:

Traditional Promotion

This form is generally used by mainstream media forms to promote products such as films. The footage placed on the net generally consists of normal 35mm quality footage compressed down and either streamed as a movie clip or available as a downloadable file. A good example is the 'Harry Potter' trailer, it only exists as a streaming movie clip on the main website and shows the limits of this form of web-film: The image is small, the sound clunky and many of the grand imagery that is designed for the cinema is lost due to file size and compression restrictions.

Harry Potter Official Web Site
http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/intro.html

Another example is the 'Lord of the Rings' trailer has some excellent visuals but to get the full effect you really need to download the film, which on an normal modem takes a while.

'Lord of the Rings' Official Site
http://www.lordoftherings.net/

Films not made for, but distributed via the Internet.

These are films shot using the normal rules of filmmaking and are using the internet not as a viewing medium, but as a way of distributing work to a wider audience. These also tend to consist of streamed footage or large downloaded images. An example here is the The Gangsters 2 trailer, a promotional film for an Eidos/Hothouse game and is available as a downloadable MPEG. The film itself is nice, but it shows how limitations can effect the form of what your trying to acheieve as complex in-game images and scrolling text are lost by the compression problems. It's obvious watching it that it has not been designed with the Internet in mind.

Another example is '405: The Movie', it's a good short film made by special effects technitions who wanted to move from post-production to creating narative. The film is high quality and not aimed at being streamed - more purchased or downloaded. "I thought (405) was groundbreaking because it was two filmmakers who had essentially made a film on their computer, " said John Fitzgerald, head of the programming department at iFilm.

'405' The Movie
http://www.405themovie.com/

Films made with the Internet in mind

These are films made with the medium of the Internet and it's constraints and view medium in mind. Now the categories become more complex as to what is a film:

Animated GIFF - This is the earliest form of any kind of media content, single frames flashed one in from of another. it is reminiscent of early forms of moving image such as a flick-book or a Zoetrope. For example; Grammatron. This is an early exploration of the form of narrative in a web medium. The story is of note as it follows a narrative structure of the reader’s choice. In terms of film content, it's a good example of a site that uses animated GIFFs in a form appropriate to the medium to convey feeling and mood.

Mark Amerika's 'Gramatron'
http://www.gramatron.com/

One could look at the web-animation package Flash. This is Macromedia's low-bandwidth, easy to use software for creating web animations and interactivity. Many filmmakers have seized upon it as a method of making films that consider the medium of the Internet with some excellent results.

Machinima is a form that uses computer game engines from popular 3D games as a kind of virtual studio, "Enter a little-known but explosively growing field of film, the bastard child of the modification' scene that sprung up around iD Software's Quake, when they first announced that users could freely modify and change it: Machinima." This form has a steep learning curve, but the resultant movies can fit complete 2 hour films into an hour downloads over a slow modem, something a traditional film cannot hope to achieve as yet. In addition it requires little technology other than a computer, a copy of a 3D game such as Quake and patience. Cameras, lighting, sound, actors and studio sets are achieved using the computer games 3D engine, "Used to adapting and changing virtually any 3D engine or game to create films, it's on a collision course with the next generation of TV-perfect games- games set not in a dodgy game background written in half an hour by a programmer on a coffee break, but in richly detailed and popular universes already known to millions of viewers, with game content specifically designed to dove-tail perfectly with that background"

'Matrix 4x1' is a series of four short films originally commissioned from Walking Wounded (the commercial arm of Machinima creators Strange Company) by Cybernetic Productions, set in the world of Warner Bros' "The Matrix". Showing four short scenes from the never-ending action of the Matrix universe, these sequences were made using Machinima techniques within the Half-Life 3D engine. Whilst not originally intended for release, we're proud to announce that we can now make 'Control Room', one of the four sequences, fully available, and offer you preview shots from the others in the sequence."

Strange Company, the makers of 'Matrix 4x1'
http://strangecompany.org/matrix/

Within filmmaking there are also video filmmakers who are producing films that account for the medium. A good example of this is Dave Mckean's short film 'The Week Before', about the week before God created the earth. Mckean began his creative career working on comics with such critically aclaimed titles as 'Arkham Asylum' and 'Sandman'. The film has good light and dark contrast, bold images such as the masks the characters wear that hark back to the early days of cinema or ancient Greek Theatre - no ambiguity of facial features. There is little fine detail that may be lost in compression. The camera work is fluid and languid, so the compression software works well and the music is gentle and does not suffer a lost of mood is de-synched by the compression software.