Plugging Into the Shorts Circuit From Home Base : Movies: The goal of the low-key fest is to feature works by local filmmakers, who are often better known outside the county.

Griffin Fine Art was taking the low-key, avant-garde route when it started its mini-festival for local filmmakers last year. Just hang a white bedsheet on a wall and turn on the projector; that was the plan.

But Bob Pece, the program’s organizer, decided to splurge.

“Bill [Griffin, the gallery owner] said the sheet would be fine. It was like, ‘Why not?’ ” Pece recalled with a laugh. “But I suggested we go for it [and rent] a real screen.”

The free festival, one of the regular features at this upstart gallery in an industrial zone, is still pretty casual. The brief movies, videos and animated shorts are presented outdoors on the wall of Leo’s Auto Paint & Body next door. Spectators, asked to bring their own chairs or blankets, sit in an open area or in the nearby parking lot.

“Right now, it’s very relaxed,” Pece said. “We hope to expand it later [and move] it to a better place, but this is the way it is at the moment.”

This year’s program, which begins Saturday at dusk and continues July 22 and Aug. 26, showcases films by Beatrice Palicka, Gayle Gardner, John Gibbons, Pedro Castro-Gonzalez, Kam Noon, James Kwasniewski, Eric Hueg and Pece, all Orange County residents. None of the movies run longer than 22 minutes, with the shortest clocking in at barely three.

They range from abstract visions of life to more documentary-oriented pieces and ones with straighter storytelling, Pece said, adding that he hopes the variety will appeal to audiences.

“The general public may scratch their heads and say, ‘Huh?’ about my stuff and some of the others, but an art audience will get it,” he said. “The first [festival] was well-received. We’re interested in feedback.”

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Pece noted that some of the filmmakers have received major awards and have presented their work in several influential festivals yet remain relatively unknown here. Palicka and Gardner, who live in Irvine and Costa Mesa, respectively, are good examples, he said.

Palicka’s 5 1/2-minute-long “Sportsters” won awards at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Film Front National Film Video Festival in Salt Lake City and was shown at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. “Sportsters” focuses on an open-road bicycle race between a white engineer and a Mexican farm worker.

Gardner has a pair of five-minute shorts in the program: “Richard” (described as “a postcard travelogue with messages”) and “Umbrellas” (which “explores a visual landscape of old memories and new realizations with text”). Gardner has screened her films at the Big Muddy Film Festival in Illinois and the American Film Institute National Video Festival and won the 1993 First Frame Award from PBS.

“It would be really nice for people in O.C. to see what’s being done in O.C. I mean, we have a lot of talented people right here,” Pece said. “It’s ironic that someone like Beatrice [Palicka] can win international awards, but nobody here has even heard of her.”

Pece also wants people to see his own animated works. The 45-year-old San Juan Capistrano resident, a pictorial artist who incorporates surreal designs influenced by “ceramics and furniture” in his paintings and drawings, will screen his “The Legend Unlikely,” a cartoon that runs nearly 10 minutes about “a fictitious character in the history of cartoons, from his early struggles to recent fiascoes.”

“It’s pre-Mickey Mouse,” he continued. “It’s about this animator who kept plugging away, and it’s tongue-in-cheek. . . . My piece may be the most avant-garde, the strangest, in the show.”

Although the festival has felt at home lighting up the side of Leo’s Auto Paint & Body, it would like to move sometime this year. Pece said the historic Santora Building in Santa Ana, which may become the linchpin of a fledgling Artists Village for emerging artists, would be an ideal site to screen films.

“We’d love to expand this, maybe to two festivals a year,” he said. “It would also be nice to do something indoors. I think everybody likes it, at least during the summer when it’s warm, [but moving indoors] would give us the chance” to not worry about the weather.

* Griffin Fine Art’s Summer Outdoor Film Series begins Saturday at dusk at 1640 Pomona Ave., Costa Mesa. Continues July 22 and Aug. 26. Free. (714) 646-5665.