Cinematic Arias

Okay, I’m prone to hyperbole but I’m not the only one wondering if this is a dark age for independent filmmakers or if we are at the dawn of a new golden age (probably both). According to the old guard, the sky is falling, the industry as we’ve enjoyed it is dying, party over, oops, out of time. On the other hand, forward thinking, technically-minded folk like Scott Kirsner and Lance Weiler believe that the readily available means of digital production, the internet as a distribution pipeline and social media as a primary networking/marketing tool will allow anyone, even you, to grow your own audience and take the leap from weekend hobbyest to career content creator.

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Personally, while imbued with a healthy does of skepticism and prone to ranting, I’m looking for a glimmer of hope on the horizon. It is with those glasses and crash helmet that I begin this series I’m calling “Filmmakers are Dead” (we’ve talked about Dark Tony, right?). My goal is very selfish: I hope to better understand what’s going on and hopefully get your two-cents in the process. In order to give this series some structure, I’m gonna release one installment per basic reporter questions (i.e., who, what, when, where, why and how).

Welcome to the first installment:

Who?

As I’ve already mentioned, this is very much the old guard (mainstream media such as the studios, broadcasters and all those that profit from working with them under the current structure) versus forward thinking up-and-coming artists.

Allow me a tangent here (the first of many). Let’s breakdown these artists of the internet age into the major disciplines addressed by Scott in the interview above. We can safely say that the majority of internet artists are either musicians, animators or filmmakers. I’d like to permanently break filmmakers out from under this umbrella. Why?

1. Unlike musicians or animators, filmmakers can’t make movies by themselves in their bedrooms. Filmmakers need crews, locations and actors/subjects.
2. Films, on the whole, will always cost more than the output of musicians or animators. While Jill Sobule can hold a web-a-thon to raise $75,000 to comfortably record a very polished album, a filmmaker would need to raise anywhere from three to ten times that amount to create an equally commercially viable and polished film.
3. Independent feature films don’t lend themselves to the internet by simple virtue of their length. According to Scott, five minutes is the longest any internet video should run (after that, viewers bounce). And again, unlike the musician who can put their full length album up as individual MP3s, the feature filmmaker can’t really present their film as a chopped up series of shorts.

Let me tackle another tangent. The popular term for filmmakers of the internet age is content creator and personally, I hate that term. I know it’s meant to expand the understood scope of what filmmakers create (features, shorts, websites, web series,  games, ARGs, etc.) but it makes me sound like I’m some corporate shill pumping out widgets for customers. It strips the art out of what we do. Yes, I understand that one of the keys to survival under this is new model is identifying your audience and targeting them with laser like precision but that also means you need to brand and market yourself as a specific kind of content creator. You are the dude that makes motorcycle films, period. Me, I’m still exploring my artistic voice but I beleive all my works are steeped with the themes that drive me, Look at Scorsese. It doesn’t matter if he makes a period romance, a gangster flick, a horror thriller or even a music video, you can recognize his works by their themes and style. Me, I’m a filmmaker.

Now, let’s get back to the “them” that I simply described as the old guard. Yes, it’s easy to boo the major studios and broadcasters, their corporate parents and all their related media spawn but don’t we all want to play in their yard? I know we’re all in an economic crisis and I don’t know where they get the stones to say “instead of giving you a commercial with a six-figure budget we’re gonna demand a high quality product with a two week turn around but we’re only gonna give ya pizza money and we’re gonna call it a viral video, which we’re gonna post all over YouTube, Hulu, you name it, but we’re not sharing any of the profits. The exposure is your profit. BTW, since we’re the copyright holders we’re not gonna let you post it on your own website. Cool? My lawyers tell me it’s cool” but don’t we still do the job for the exposure and the pizza money? Hey, cold pizza will feed ya for most of the week. Plus, aren’t they scouting us, hazing us, testing us to see if we might be the right person to direct the webisodes based on their new Christian Slater series? I know it’s terribly unfair but…

Another tangent: I love how clients ask for viral videos. Um, you can’t make a viral video. You make a video, send it out into the world and it either becomes viral or it doesn’t. That’s for the internet to decide.

So now we have some idea of the players, their motivations and how they clash and commingle but let me leave you with this question: Unions and their members are always confronting major corporations (as they should) but how do they interface with new media? I’m not talking about television shows repurposed for the internet but rather original content. How do they (or any of us) make a living from new media, much less collect dues to pay for benefits? Before you answer so quickly, have you seen the budgets on new media programs? They’re all over the map: Joss Whedon‘s DOCTOR HORRIBLE cost in the low six figures, John August‘s THE REMNANTS cost over $25k and I know some folks that make internet shorts for less than $100 a pop. Want one union’s answer to new media? Check out SAG’s New Media Rate Sheet?

Next week: What?