David Holechek, a local 26-year-old, is turning his YouTube spoof of last year’s Spartan warrior hit “300” into a $250,000 full-length film.

The unusual transformation of “305” the YouTube hit to “305 the Movie” started in June when MTV organized a short film contest. Holechek and his brother Daniel decided to make their satire of “300” and submit it. But they missed the deadline for the contest so they posted the short on the video sharing site.

“We shot it in two days over a weekend and it was online seven days later,” Holechek said. “A few weeks later, the editors at YouTube put it on the front page. The first day it had 1 million views.”

Eventually, the number of people who watched it grew to 4 million.

While the “305” short qualifies as low-budget production, the Holecheks aren’t exactly backyard filmmakers. They are partners at Rivet Production & Design in Venice, where they work on documentaries, commercials and corporate videos. For “305,” they had full access to Rivet’s studio space, editing equipment and personnel.

As soon as Rivet’s other partners saw the audience response to “305,” they backed a feature-length version called “305 the Movie.” Rivet calls this project “the first viral video to transition to a narrative feature film.”

The movie is in post-production and Rivet plans to release it as an online download during the second quarter, said Tim Ellis, partner and executive producer at Rivet. Ellis also expects a retail DVD version to reach stores before the end of 2008.

But he’s looking beyond this project at its implications for the entire media industry.

“Online short-form video is the new pilot,” he said. “Studios will continue to fund pilots with big budgets, but this is the new frontier. You can produce it and flight-test it online for a fraction of the cost.”

John Vincent, chief executive officer at EyeWonder Inc., a software company in Atlanta that distributes about 20 percent of all online video ads, agrees that the Internet can provide a good testing ground for new content. But he points out that no one has figured out how to make money from a movie distributed solely online.

“From an infrastructure and user experience perspective, getting millions of people to watch a movie online is possible,” he said. But from “a business model perspective,” he doubts whether it’s really the new frontier.