With Freedom Comes Originality

Been a minute.  Well, ten weeks.  So about a hundred thousand minutes.  Sorry about that.  My goal originally was to put up a post every Monday.  Then it became every other Monday.  Apparently now it's every tenth Monday.  Maybe I just don't have that much to say.  Perhaps I only have 10% of the information that I thought I did.

I'll do better.  Starting now.

Or ten weeks from now.

So hello out there.  I'm back.  And this week (deciweek?) I'm going to touch on a subject that I've hit before, but I want to expound upon.  Originality.  Namely and abundance or lack thereof in film and it's future potential.

This is "Impression, Sunrise."

It was painted by Monet in 1872.  What makes it remarkable is its brush strokes and lack of defined lines, which make the painting look as if you're observing a sunrise while squinting, or seeing it reflected in water.  When first displayed in 1874, it was harshly criticized for basically breaking the "rules" of art.  The lack of definition went against what established artists had been doing for years.  Others however, saw the art style and loved it.  They began to emulate it, and create a whole new style of painting that begat modern art.

While you may never have heard of "Impression, Sunrise," you've probably heard of Impressionism.

Recently (as I noted before) I saw a film called Side By Side, a documentary about the end of film, and the beginning of digital.  One oft quoted line from the film came from David Lynch, regarding the now nearly free range access to film making.

"Everybody and his brother has a piece of paper and a pencil.  How many great stories have been written on that piece of paper? Now the same thing is going to happen in cinema."

Everybody and his brother also has access to a comb. 

And while he is looking at this in a somewhat cynical light, I think of anyone, Lynch should be the guy who thinks this is a great idea.  While I'm on the fence about this guy as a director/storyteller (For example, see Twin Peaks: Season One for how brilliant this guy can be, and to see a complete train wreck, check out Twin Peaks: Season Two), I think his type of storytelling only works from a studio that is willing to take a huge risk.  Pitch Mullholland Drive to a friend and see if they'll give you $20 to help you make it.

Now, you have digital filmmaking and Kickstarter.  No one on earth needs permission to make a film anymore.

And I see his point.  With that, you're going to get a lot of terrible YouTube videos to sift through to find the good ones.  And those good ones are going to be few and far between.  But I'm actually willing to bet the ratio of quality Hollywood film/TV to all Hollywood film/TV is right about in line with quality Independent film to all Independent film.  For every great film to come out of Hollywood, there's like twenty terrible ones.  Here, I made this to help you out if you're a visual learner.

R.I.P.D isn't out yet, but it already sucks.

Now I'm not talking about "Here's a video of my cat in a shark costume, riding around on the Roomba while chasing a duck" videos.  YouTube has given us an exorbitant amount of crap to watch.  In fact, it was recently shown that every minute, 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.  Which means in the time I've been writing this blog post, another six months worth of video has been uploaded.  If you jumped off of YouTube for a week and then came back, it would take you a lifetime to catch up on what you missed.  Literally a lifetime.  82 years and 289 days, or until February 2096.  That is ridiculous.

What I'm talking about is cinema.  Thought out ideas that are shot in a manner designed to tell a story.

And here's where I bring it back to what I originally wanted to talk about: Originality.  Now that no one needs permission to make a film anymore, they also don't need permission on how to make it.

Because the entire world of cinema that is crowd-funded and shot digitally lives outside the box.

And outside the box is awesome.

Not everything sticks.  Not everything is gold.  But the potential to redefine it all is there.  To break every single rule there is.

Does a movie need to be 90 minutes?  Studios don't typically fund shorts, so until recently, yes.  But not anymore.

Maybe it's short....

Maybe it's interactive...

Maybe it never ends....

A studio would never take a chance on a "found footage" horror movie that comes out in 1-10 minute segments every other week or so from now until whenever they decide to stop, based on a Photoshopped "paranormal" photo.  But the Marble Hornets footage above has popularized the Slender Man character by rounding up 55 million views overall (according to Wikipedia) and now there are two video games about the series.  Both are scary as hell to play.

So maybe the ability to use YouTube and digital footage shot extremely cheaply comparatively will give us some amazing new ideas on where the entire medium of film can go.  More people watch shows on Netflix, Hulu, or internet video now than they watch TV.  TVs are now "Smart" TVs, meaning the ability for them to connect to this media is as important (if not more so) as the ability to connect to your cable box.  Every console video game system out there can also stream internet video.  Video rental stores are all but extinct.  Movies are going the way music has with iTunes.  When is the last time you bought a CD at a store?

With that comes the ability to distribute extremely cheaply.  I don't need to press a short run 50,000 units of a film, ship it to stores, keep track of units, pay printers for the jackets, etc.  I just need to call Hulu and upload a copy of the film.  Distribution complete.

This should allow digital distributors to be a lot more open with who they let in.  I'm not costing Hulu hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to distribute my film to potentially millions of people.  It's costing them 8GB of storage.

And Lynch is right.  One downside is that there is more to sift through.  The bar can be lowered if it's not costing anyone anything.

But the upside is that we don't need defined lines anymore.