Your family and friends have seen your latest production, applauding or booing as appropriate!

Your club has screened it twice and you were fortunate to win a high enough IAC award to get a screening in one of the mini Cinemas.

So what next? Put your production in a drawer, maybe never to be seen again? It doesn't have to be like that.

Many around the world are now are on the Internet which grows by the day and is now capable of screening video, with Broadband also becoming commonplace. The Broadbandits are on the fast march!

This is where your future audiences can be found, "Beyond the Blue Horizon," as the old song goes.

Starting point

If you can navigated around the nle world, avoiding the odd rock now and then, building a web site is no more difficult, and the rocks no more threatening!

The steps to achieve this are not too irksome, the first being to check if your ISP will give you web space. You may possibly find that even if it does then the only domain name you can only use is somewhat unfriendly looking and not the short, snappy names that we see, such as www.theiac.org.uk !

If this is so and you would like a simpler domain name, perhaps your own name, or some thing more akin to your productions, then you can purchase domain names for about £3 a year. If your ISP doesn't provide you with web space you can get your site hosted by other providers, many of whom, will allow you to choose your own domain name for the small yearly fee.

What a site!

Now you have web site space, the next task is to build your site.

It doesn't have to be complicated, and to start with can consist of just a single page where you announce," Click here to see the best film on the Internet," or some other modest statement.

Other pages can be added as and when you wish. These should be easily linked to each other in a logical and suitable way to enable your visitors to navigate around your site without getting lost or finishing up in a dead end.

This is very easy to do with modern web building tools, and some, even check all your links automatically to ensure that there are no errors.

If your provider does not have any web site building application for you to use then there are many to choose from. Microsoft has, "Front Page." ( I bought an early version for W98SE off Ebay for about £10 recently.) I use Serif's WebPlus9, which is a WYSIWYG application, suited to those not interested in writing their own code, or not having the time! If you have any problems in uploading your site try "Core FTP lite." It is free to download off the internet and very easy to use.

You're page/s have to be stored in a folder all ready to upload. All you will need to create your site is a password, a user name and your server will also supply you with an fpt address where your site must be uploaded to. Remember that you download TO your PC and upload FROM it.

Sixeggs	Lepidoptera	Alphabetical order

Films on www.retinascope.co.uk

There is a simpler way to get your film on the internet, although expensive, and that is to get it 'streamed' by a streaming provider. With steaming, special techniques are used by the server to send your film over the internet. Your ordinary ISP does not have these facilities.

The information is sent at a speed governed by the recipient's player, so that the information is sent, or streamed, as and when required, handshaking taking place to ensure a smooth flow.

One advantage of streaming is that it is more difficult, although not impossible, for any site visitor to copy your film. But as it is of relatively poor quality compared with DVD or miniDV and could not be usefully reused does that really matter? You can always add a watermark if copying concerns you.

Another way is to use asx files, which is rather like streaming, but don't cost you! These files can carry additional information about your film/audio such as author/copyright etc and it also controls a progressive download of your film. This means that your viewers can see the film immediately without the delay, unlike wmv windows media player files where there is a delay for buffering before the films begin to play. Search Google for asx information.

Have a squeeze!

Your film is probably in the form of an .avi file and as such, is very large, so it will have to be encoded and compressed. I suggest that you encode your film for Windows Media Player as it is found on most PCs.

The encoder can be downloaded from Microsoft's site, but if you use Premier nle the encoder is built in.

You can encode your film for those on 'dial up' to view it if you wish, but the quality is not very good. If you encode it for broadband viewing the quality is better but don't expect DVD quality. You can encode for both and give your web site visitor the choice as to which to use depending on if he is on dial up or broadband. Encoded for 385 kb/sec seems to give good all round results for broadband users. Full size screen viewing is now possible, the days of the tiny postage stamp size image when watching video on the internet are long gone.

The GillianG Video Collection	Channel 7	Westlake Films
Cambridge Movies Workshop	Orpington Video & Film Makers	Edinburgh Cine and Video Society

A small selection of websites with online movies

My philosophy regarding the lower quality of films shown on the internet is that it is better they should be seen in lower quality than stay in that drawer. Incidentally, the more detail there is in your film the worst the result will be. Films with simple uncluttered backgrounds have the highest encoded quality. and these are probably the best films anyway!

So choose your film and encode it. You will find this new wmv file is over 100 times smaller than the original avi file! That's a mighty lot of squeezing and it's a continual wonder to me how such great compression gives such pretty good results when viewed over the internet, but it does.

You can now watch your encoded film on your own PC simply by using your Windows Media Player and be able to judge how it will look to others who download it from your web site. In fact, you can do this even if you are not interested in proceeding further on to the Internet at all! Just encode and watch it as others might see it.

If the film looks and sounds OK you can insert it into your web site project using the 'insert video' button or similar which you will have on your web site building application. Another idea is to show a suitable still frame from your film and request those who wish to view the film to click on the frame.

You can if you so wish include on your site text about yourself and the film together with production stills. If you write poetry/paint why not include that too on a separate page?

Sitting in the ninepennies!

One disadvantage with Windows Media player is that the film does not run on your own web site page but on the rather unCinema like WMplayer which is launched each time a viewer wishes to see your film.

It would have more cinema atmosphere to have your film running on a page with a background more in keeping with the subject matter, or more akin to watching in a cinema.

To embed your film on your own page special techniques are required and are not for the absolute beginner.

I have posh(!) curtains in mine and a foyer too, and although the films are not yet embedded in curtains am now learning how to do this from the internet.........more learning curves to climb, and stairs are getting steeper too!

If you are willing to pay, "Clipstream" offers a way of embeding film. VX30 is another such system, but both are very expensive, although seeing the many hundreds of pounds we can pay these days for nle, maybe not. New systems are coming so continual searching of the internet and reading the Web Master forums is one way of keeping in touch.

But the simplest way, (and it's free!) is to use Microsoft's own Windows Media embedded system using activeX. A short piece of html code is put on your page, and when the page is opened a small WM player is opened on your page, rather than launching it separately. In this way you can control whereabouts on your page the film is to run, the size of the presentation and suitable surroundings to it. You can arrange to have the controls removed from the base of the player, leaving just the film, so it looks like a Cinema. Just like being in the ninepennies!

The disadvantage is that you are now relying on a third party (Microsoft) for the system to work, and if they ceased support for the ActiveX files required then this method of embedding would cease unless someone else supported it.

Also you should check out how it presents on other browsers and screen settings.

Hello World, I'm here.

If you have succesfully put your encoded film on your web site and uploaded it to your server, you can now use your Explorer browser to find your site on the Internet. How very exciting that is when done for the very first time.

Just type your domain name into your browser and there, after a short pause, is your page. You have a web site. You are a Webmaster! Congratulations.

Click on the area where you put the film and you should be in business and it should play for you. But not for any one else, alas.

You can tell all your friends about your site and the film, but they have already seen it! What you now wish to do is to tell the world about it and let them pour into your new Internet Cinema and watch your production. So how to do that?

Each time you build a web site you will be given the opportunity in the web building application to give your site a title. This should be descriptive of your site and contain all the important words about it. You must also add what are called Meta tags, keywords to describe each page on your site. These are used by the search engines to pick up your site when someone is searching for, say documentary films on the Internet.

If you have a short documentary film about the pollution of the River Thames, then your keywords could be.... River, River-Thames, Pollution-of -Thames, pollution, contaminated-river, documentary, Short-film.

You might also like to spell 'pollution' in different ways in case a potential viewer cannot spell.

Another thing to do after you have launched your site is to set up a links page and find other sites with a similar intererst as yours. Ask them to cross link with you.

In this way you will increase your potential audience and cross listing to other similar sites will also help the search engines pick you up faster. Search the internet for similar sites to your own and drop them an e-mail asking them to look at your site and requesting a cross link with each other. This will help to increase your visitors and in return will help them increase theirs too.

Other sites will insert links for you just by filling in a short form without your listing them. Free advertising! What could be better? I have many photo stills on my site and so have had it listed on photographic sites too.

In this way, you will be more likely to be found. But first you should let the search engines know that you are alive and kicking. Many of them will allow you to register manually with them, although there are specialist sites who will do this work for you, for a small cost.

A free one I have used is, 'Self Promotion.' which you can find by searching Google for it. (I have a link to it on my own site) It has all the facilities for finding and registering search engines and directories, together with much useful information about optimising your web site for the search engines. I've spent hours reading there!

Who's watching?

Eventually you will be curious to know where your visitors are coming from. You can use web statistics to enable you to do this. It gives a Web Master a warm glow to see a map of the world with tiny coloured pins showing where one's site have been viewed.

These web statistics work by inserting a small piece of html code into your page/s. Very easy to do, just copy and paste! When a visitor arrives this code informs the webstats that you have a hit. To find such services,and there are dozens, just type 'webstats' into your search engine to find them.

A great webstat which will list up to100 visits for you free(!) can be found at www.statcounter.com.

They also have a wonderful forum and the helpful guys and gals there will review your site ( if it's presentable!) and suggest improvements for you. Here you will also learn what a huge subject web site building can be, altho' as a beginner, just take one step at a time.

You mustn't be impatient for 'web site hits,' as it may take many months for the search engines to pick up your site and for things to begin to move. It cannot be overemphasised too much that they will pick your site very much faster if it is search engine friendly! SEO (search engine optimization) is the name of the game if you wish to be found. The right keywords and plenty of interesting text for starters!

You may ask: is it worth all the effort to begin to climb this new learning curve and become a Webmaster?

Just to say that in the last six months I have had 5,000 visitors from over 20 countries, (including the Virgin Islands!), viewing over 13,000 pages on my website. The visitors have used up sufficient bandwidth to watch about 400 films and view my static photos too. That's certainly worth the effort as the audience is now ongoing into the future too, forever picking up new visitors from who knows where? Would I have ever had anything like that number of by entering festivals?

So you too can now ensure that your pet production is no longer rotting away in a drawer but is out there for the whole world to see, just a click away, "Beyond the Blue Horizon!"

- Albert Noble    Nov 2005

Email Animation@btinternet.com
Website www.retinascope.co.uk

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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