GEORGE TOWN, Jan 26 — Unless you attend film festivals regularly, chances are you will hardly have the opportunity to watch good short films.
Co-founders of online video screening platform, Viddsee.com, Ho Jia Jian and Derek Tan, saw an opportunity in this.
“We attend all these film festivals in the region and at each festival, we will get to see really good short films but we started to realise, if we had not attended the festival, we would not have been able to watch these films,” Ho said in an interview with The Malay Mail Online.
This is where the seed of an idea for Viddsee.com was born and before long, Ho and Tan started thinking of ways to make sure South-East Asian short films get a wider audience and if possible, an international one.
The duo, who are both engineers and film-makers, explored various ways to create a platform for this but did not want it to be on YouTube as was suggested to them.
“We must remember that YouTube is like Walmart, where it has everything in it from cat videos to baby videos to commercials so unless people are specifically searching for a film or a director, these films will still be buried underneath all these jumble of videos,” Ho said.
They then did an experiment by creating a Facebook page and posting short films on it regularly and they started getting a lot of response.
As Ho and Tan were already creating platforms for telecommunication companies and TV in their day jobs as engineers at that time, they decided that they might as well create their own platform for South-East Asian short films.
Viddsee came into being in February last year and it has recorded more than 150,000 visitors since then, a modest number for now, but the duo believe it will grow rapidly as they are working hard to create a strong online presence.
One of the ways to do that is for the site to partner with regional film festivals as a complementary service to these events.
The site has already partnered with Chaktomuk Short Film Contest (Cambodia), the National Museum of Singapore’s Singapore Short Cuts and now, Tropfest SEA.
It has almost 300 titles and just a few months back, it opened up the platform to include Asian films and unveiled a new Channels programme.
The Channels programme is a collection of films curated by content partners such as the Singapore Short Film Awards and the Hong Kong Arts Centre.
Many of the films on Viddsee are debut films by Asian film-makers, most made in languages like Chinese, Thai, Tagalog and Malay but with English subtitles to suit an international audience.
Viddsee also organises online contests, in collaboration with its content partners, such as the Tropfest SEA 2014 Audience Choice Awards which allows an online audience to vote for their favourite short films out of the 12 finalists from today onwards.
The site has a wide range of genres but Ho stressed that only films with a strong compelling story are put up and many of the short films are debuted on Viddsee.
Ho said it is fortunate that Viddsee was awarded seed funding of S$50,000 (RM130,407) from ACE, a startup incubator by the Singaporean government, so that he and Tan can invest more time and effort to concentrate on developing the site.
Both of them have big plans for Viddsee and this includes making it the “Netflix of Asia” so feature films may soon be put up on the site and possibly premium subscriptions will be in place for viewers to access certain films.
For now, the site is free to view and more importantly free for Asian film-makers to submit their short films to be featured.
