I guess this blog post comes out of the aftermath of the mess that was the doomed blog post I was trying to write about new media sources and the ‘new entertainment reality’. The thrust of that post would have been an intelligent and witty look* at the use of the internet by artists self-publishing their work and the new trend of by-passing the traditional channels of distribution.
(*Of course, that blog post will probably never be written so you’ll just have to take my word for how incredible it would have been! Almost certainly more witty than this one will end up…)
Zeroing in on one part of that blog post’s frankly sprawling topic is probably the safest way of getting at least some of my thoughts down on paper. This post was prompted by the discovery, on the internet a few days ago, of the release of a new episode of a web based TV series called ‘Pioneer 1’. I had stumbled across the first episode a few months back and the latest episode looks to have been released within the last week or so. It’s a show that has the feel and vibe of classic X-Files and is financed through fan donation and released through vodo.net (not a company I had heard of before tbh). Its production values are high and with one or two exceptions the standard of acting is very good. (After all, there’s nothing more jarring that watching wooden, ham actors floundering through a scene, no matter how well it’s written.) It’s available at http://vodo.net/pioneerone and I would recommend you check it out if you were ever a fan of Chris Carter’s best work.
I’ve always been interested in films and the process of film making. I’m one of those boring people who will watch every extra and documentary on a DVD or Blu-Ray and then watch the movie over and over again, each time listening to a different commentary track to get insights from actors and directors into how the film was made. I have always wanted to make movies myself, even to the point, several years ago, of writing a fully blown movie script based around the Perplex City ARG from Mind Candy. There were plans for a bunch of us to make this into a fan film, but I don’t think any of us truly realised the amount of work involved in such an endeavour. Looking back at the scripts (I found them again on an old drive recently) it would have had to have been made with a cast of dozens of actors, working on an international shoot (with scenes set both in the UK and the US) if the end result were to ever match the scope and vision of the original script. Oh, and there was no budget to speak of either! Needless to say, it never really got off the ground, which is a shame and always a regret of mine.
However, it does help illustrate one point quite well. Producing a film yourself (whatever the type) is a long, hard, frustrating and expensive process. That said, as technology gets more and more powerful, it is becoming increasingly achievable to match the vision with reality. The prices of digital video cameras are constantly dropping and even a top of the range, fully equipped H.D. video camera can be had for under £1000. Video editing tools are making their way out of the studio and onto home computers, with non-linear editing software packages such as Adobe’s Creative Suite (with tools such as Première and After Effects) or, for Mac lovers, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, becoming a realistic option for the budding amateur film maker. 3D packages are getting better and special effects that were once the sole domain of the effects wizards are becoming available to those with the time and the talents to create them. (Although as with acting, a bad special effect can ruin a scene and this is evident on even some big budget TV series. Primeval anyone?)
No longer is the power to produce powerful, moving drama solely in the hands of the big studio. The potential is there for anyone to be the next Alfred Hitchcock or Edgar Wright, distributing their works via the web. Of course the ease and availability of near-professional quality tools is no substitute for talent and vision (and money) and I guess the old adage that everyone has at least one book in them, but should probably leave it there, is as true for movie makers as well. But for those with the talent and drive, the potential possibilities are getting greater and greater with every passing year.
One real problem, however, with relying on the internet to distribute and publish your media is simply the huge glut of content being added every second, from all over the world. YouTube is a great example of this and suffers mightily from its own success.
You may feel that you have just created the best film/music video/documentary/comedy/sci-fi classic/whatever on the planet, but if you post it to a site where 1000s of like-minded individuals are posing their own ‘world beating’ creations every day, then how do you stand out from the crowd and get yourself noticed?
It should be noted that this is in no way just limited to video. I came across a comment about musicians uploading their music to the MySpace website, questioning why you would put your music in the one place where there are thousands of other musicians doing exactly the same thing? (Of course, music creation is another area of media that is now more open to the possibilities of the ‘a hit record created and recorded in someone’s bedroom’ syndrome.)
Probably, but I’m not sure what it is. (I guess that is why I am not in the marketing business.)
Of course, you could say that the answer is for you to just post your work to a site that doesn’t have so much content, or indeed even create your own site. But then how do you generate traffic to that site? Any website that doesn’t have the thousands of users uploading content to it, probably also does not have the large numbers of visitors either. As with YouTube, websites can quickly become victims of their own success.
I know quite a few talented and exciting artists that host or maintain their own websites but many of them still rely on places like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr or YouTube to get the word out about their work.
Answers on a postcard to..?
