At Mr. Ruffus’ Request
Quoting from an earlier comment from fellow gentleman Ruffus:
“I’m really hoping that David still does a bit of film-making. I’d love to see a short film documenting this process. A time lapse film would be cool too.”
Quoting from my own introductory post:
“As much as I’ve criticized and lamented the effect of culture and technology on the independent professional, I also recognize that we are living in a true Golden Age of Amateurism. So long as the scope of one’s efforts are limited to what can be supported in one’s spare time, there is really no limit to what might be attempted.”
Betwix, this from Density Duck:
“If you want to say “this is an artificial scarcity that only existed due to limitations of insufficiently advanced technology” then that’s fine, but remember that attitude when you wonder why the only books are by John Grisham an the only music is either Top 40 pop or Christian Rock.”
And then my answer to Ruffus:
“What film-making is done around the Mon Tiki build will be those that serves the promotional needs of the project or my personal whimsy.”
I believe the Duck is using hyperbole to make his point, but I don’t disagree. My own guess about where this is all going with entertainment is that it is going the same place as it’s gone with everything before entertainment: many more lower stakes players at the bottom, a very few high stakes player at the top, and almost no one in between.
—
In his book You Are Not a Gadget, techno-philosopher Jaren Lanier suggests that “making a video that takes 100 times longer to make than it takes to watch” might be an action that would counter some of the aspects of our info-culture that concern him.
Whether or not this would be helpful, I don’t know. I do know that the very small films that I make have a ratio of somewhere between 4,000 to 10,000 man hours for every hour of screen time, depending how you count.
The below video is nowhere near that. I don’t even think it meets Lanier’s magic ratio, especially not if you subtract the time spent doing the activity that is the subject of the video.
I do know it’s about all I can manage if I have to make a living doing something else. A soundman on my set once observed “Film is logarithmic.” Small increases/improvement to what makes it onto the screen entail huge increases in the time, money and effort.
In any event, this little slide show has nice music; it’s free on your Mac. Very rootsy. Laying it in reminds me of old needle-drop sessions.
Also please note my shop worn copy of Phil C. Bolger’s Boats with an Open Mind in the first frame.
To some extent the march of technology will probably smear out the differences in what we might call “fanciness” between the lower end and the higher end. An amateur filmmaker can get shooting quality equal to the pros; he can do his special effects on the same hardware, with the same tools; he can produce the sound the same way, he can get mass distribution without having to sign up to any contracts, all sorts of things.
This doesn’t mean that the amateur production will be good. It just means that we’re less likely to see a terrible professional production succeed merely on the strength of graphics and spectacle.Report
An amateur filmmaker can… do his special effects on the same hardware, with the same tools…
But only up to a point. Consider Transformers 3 (which I admit to watching for the CGI alone — well, and then to see if there were any shots of Ms. Huntington-Whiteley where her lips didn’t look like someone had inadvertently smacked her in the mouth). Most of the individual robots consisted of about 10,000 components, and took 30 weeks to define. The “Driller” character consisted of over 70,000 defined components and their relationships. Rendering the scene where the worm chewed up a skyscraper at IMAX resolution required 288 hours of processing time per frame. ILM’s proprietary physics library to generate the motion for 20,000 bits of collapsing skyscraper isn’t available to others.
Of course, these don’t mean that the state-of-the-art professional production will make it a good movie.Report
The idea of photography being a democratic artform has a history as long as the medium itself. More thoughts on this later.Report
Check the “f’s” in Rufus.Report
I was fascinated by that. Did the later F migrate over? Does it bring us closer to spelling suffer backwards? I sort of like it with two f’s.Report
The extra ‘f’ is for ‘fish’Report
Of course. +1Report
Even before the extra F was pointed out I had a post about IT and copy editing and proof reading in the work.
Sorry Ruphus.Report