Recently I was reading a blog entry by a former contributor at Rewindvideo.com and Microcinemascene. In his musings he referred to a time' before the end of the microcinema movement'. It ended? Perhaps he's right. After all, our website back then had a thousand members, dozens of contributing writers and a plethora of mediocre quality films to hide the few good ones in. Now? Well, you're pretty much looking at it. But I think it might be more accurate to say that microcinema has evolved. Most of the people behind Rewind were very young, and the site did little to screen it's entries for fear of discouraging developing talent. What resulted was a huge influx of poorly made films, and the terms no-budget and amateur were most frequently used to describe them. In fact we reveled in it - that soft VHS quality verified that we had done it all ourselves. It didn't get any more indie than us.

In time of course some of the site's members felt that the membership carried a juvenile quality, and aspired to raise the bar. Thus through a series of departures and changes, MicrocinemaScene.com was born. Under new management the site prospered for a while, and Rewind slowly flickered out. Rewind's film festival, which had peaked in it's third year, changed it's banner, it's look and it's location, but ultimately faded away as well. The new website had a more collegiate feel, fitting for it's now older members who had continued to progress as storytellers. But the new crew behind the site learned as I did that operating a film co-op is a very time consuming endeavor, and after a few years and changes in management, it too ran out its lifespan.

As most know, the two sites were rejoined under a new banner, Common Film, operated again by the original Rewind operator - yours truly. The traffic was there, the content was good, but the community had since moved on. Largely due to it's creative commons mandate, the site yielded few regular members compared to it's previous incarnations. It's niche podcast had a small but loyal audience thanks to a long run of interviews with filmmakers from all around North America and the UK, and of course ongoing film reviews.

But these things are websites, not some microcinema movement. To tell if microcinema is still alive, we must first define it. To some it refers to the medium by which it's distributed, namely the web. To others, it's the budget - and this brings further confusion, since some think fifty grand qualifies where others would cap it at one. Personally I've felt that five grand is a good top number - after that you're talking about serious investment which would aim for a return. Historically, microcinema has never made a return. It's an exercise. A hobby of love, which yields a wide variety of quality and is accessible to all.

Who are we to say the high-school kid making a Star Wars fan film is any less a microcinema producer than the horror producer who has been shooting HD for the last three years? It's about spirit. Filmmakers are a passionate bunch, but all of us want to see something back for our work. If it's profit you aim for, I would say that's not microcinema. You (hopefully) understand the marketplace and invest your time and money accordingly. If it's a free web release you are planning, with aspirations of praise from thousands of loyal viewers, then this is probably microcinema.

And if that's true, than microcinema isn't a movement - it's a method. It's not dead. It lives and breathes on Vimeo, YouTube, and hopefully now here at Film Rogue. And as usual we'll have to sift through the crap to find the gems. But the fact remains that all around the world people are making films simply because they want to share them, and I don't expect that will change anytime soon.