Moving Still Media

While Directing the post-apocalyptic film”The Road”, based on the Cormic McCarthy novel (incidentally shot on the Red One with limited budget), director John Hillcoat kept a diary.  It’s a great read, published in The Telegraph. Perhaps the most penetrating thought is at the very end in the Epilogue where he addresses the filmmaking world more broadly. (via movieScope)

“The perfect storm has arrived in Hollywood: a global economic downturn combined with piracy an the increase of downloading on the internet – what happened to the record companies years ago but with much higher stakes. The reactionary first phase has kicked in – few films in development, many films put on hold or shut down.

My own new project – with a much-loved script by Nick Cave and a dream all-star cast – has fallen apart. The finance company that we began The Road with has also fallen apart, having to radically downsize to one remaining staff member. The great divide has begun, with only very low-budget films being made or huge 3D franchise films – the birth of brand films such as Barbie, Monopoly: The Movie – who knows what’s ext, Coca-Cola: The Movie?

I end the year appropriately – gazing into the apocalypse of my own industry.”

Similar changes are happening for artists and content creators across mediums — magazine photographers, gallery artists, musicians, and many other corners of the creative world.

Let’s examine the indie film world as an example, but this mirrors many fields of content creation (the nature of the rise in each field varies, but the fall and potential for rebirth is nearly identical).  With films like Pulp Fiction and Clerks, the Hollywood studios bought or opened “indie” divisions such as Miramax. The holy grail of indie filmmakers was to make their movie scraping the resources together, go to a festival like Sundance or Torronto to show it to these studio buyers, then sell their films for millions and have their careers made like Tarantino and Spike Jones.

This past year three of the four big “indie” divisions of the major studios closed, and the fourth was greatly reduced in stature. There is not really a serious outlet for even the best indie films. The New York Times today has a great story on this development in the indie world with the article “Talking About a Revolution (for a Digital Age)“.

As tough as it has become to make an indie low-to-no-budget film and find professional distribution, I think this is a blessing in disguise. At the exact time that technology has enabled mass distribution by content creators, the traditional distribution has turned it’s back on the indie world. The solution seems obvious, let’s take control of distributing or own work.  Let’s build a direct relationship with our own audiences. One that continues from project to project, in fact BUILDS from project to project like new album releases from a band.

Ted Hope of the TrulyFreeFilm blog further develops the thought in his post “Sundance Observations“:

To me, the filmmaking community (the artists, the business folk, the curators & promoters, the appreciators & fans) have to embrace that we are in a seismic shift to an artist-centric collaboration with the audience and away from the corporate controlled supply & attention.

This is the future. We are very lucky to be artists and content creators at this moment in history.