If you want to disrupt film and/or tv industry then you have to disrupt people, not technology (by much). It's a people problem.
It takes a lot of people in a collaborative manner to work on a product like that, with each person being skilled and expensive. You need a lot of people like that for a long time. You also need wood, nails, paint, cars, space, energy... lots of those in order to build sets. And someone to imagine them and someone to design them.
Having a fancy camera, grip, lenses is a tiny tiny proportion of any reasonable-sized budget. Most of the money goes to people and towards materials, rentals and space for sets.
It's a lot of money too, if you want to make something reasonable. Not everything can be made on a small budget with innovative story. Some products can, but not majority.
What it means is that you need a lot of cash, and for that you need investors (or deep pockets and then you don't care, maybe). With investors there are expectations of return on investment. And with that you're in the realm of distribution.. and then real complexities come forward.
You can't expect to raise anything moderate in crowd-funding for these types of products. It's too much for the level where that is now.
Note: I work in this industry. I have or have access to free state-of-the-art cameras, grip, lenses, even studio facilities and more, yet I can't make a movie just like that. I still need to pay lots of people to do their job and pay the materials for (at least some) sets or set dressing.
It's a people problem. They need to eat and pay bills and they don't care (much) about your grand vision if you're not paying.
The professionals in industries like yours make things look easy, so to speak, in that understanding behind-the-scenes effort and organization is absolutely staggering to witness first hand. I've done some minor level sound work (boom mic) but also drop in on some sets when filming around town, like Fox's cancelled "The Good Guys" and I can really appreciate the intensity and costs associated with such productions.
The internet is a lot like an open mic night, and in this regard, there are some gems to be found, but it's going to take wading through a whole lot of...ugh...
They'll get several seasons of Power Rangers, a quality production that required the work of many professionals in the same industry. A lot of whom were probably new to the industry, building experience required to land jobs under people like Spielberg in the future.
Honest question, have there ever been any attempts to vary the price of content based on cost to produce?
If a studio wants to pump out high quality, low budget teen slasher flicks, why cant they sell at half the price of a CGI blockbuster?
Would those straight-to-dvd or midday movies do better if their value wasn't directly compared to AAA titles? Sure, it may not have been The Godfather, but it was a quarter of the price to see, so I don't feel ripped off.
If a movie uses unknown actors (which to me always feels more immersive than trying to imagine a star as yet another persona...), why does it have to cost me the same as a movie with individual actors paid an order of magnitude more than the previous film's entire budget?
Why do foreign films have to compete with American films at an equal price point (for local tickets)? Would more people choose a random Bollywood flick over the generic rom-com on date night if tickets were half the price at the same theater?
Maybe that's what we're seeing with original programming on things like Netflix?
With those budgets you can't hire top crew talent, and without A list cast you can't attract audience. So you will have a film that doesn't look like A budget film and you won't sell tickets. A list cast costs that much because they have brand value. With a product like that you're destined for TV and rental market. It exists and it works, but it can't fight in the same arena for viewer tickets.
There's also a feedback loop. New actors are introduced along established ones. That's how they become established themselves. And the cycle repeats. Doing a movie with whole unknown cast is extremely risky. Because you lose any brand value coming from actors. Two questions when considering watching a movie are: What is it about? Who's in it?
* It takes a lot of people to write software, too. Those SoMoLo SaaS world-changers don't design and code themselves.
* But, the tech industry has found ways to bootstrap ideas that do not involve eight- or nine-figure up-front bets. The only difference between "high end" movies and "indie film" is that indies merely require six- or seven-figure up-front bets.
* Every industry that is disrupted goes through two revolutions: (1) it is digitized, i.e. it joins the "World Of Bits" (VGR) or the "IT Era" (Stratechery's phrasing); and (2) it is networked, i.e. the Internet enables new business models and production modes.
* That first revolution usually benefits incumbents. It lets them do the same exact things, more efficiently.
* Further, that first revolution is commonly confused with "disruption". But if it's not unseating incumbents -- it ain't.
* Filmed entertainment is still at the tail end of this first revolution. (I had the first two RED cameras, so I've had a front row seat to this.) But many pieces of the supply chain are still mired in Paper Belt mentality.
I mainly wrote this to stimulate discussion and thought among my film industry peers. Ironically, there's been far more engagement from y'all hackers instead. Probably because hackers, like rappers, tend to think of themselves as entrepreneurs by default. Filmmakers: you need to catch up.
How many products out there, say hardware products, have that kind of a dynamic. Imagine someone investing a hundred million dollars on an idea for a gadget based on nothing more than a description of the gadget and, maybe, the people who will be involved in the execution of the project.
OK, maybe that scenario had happened a few times. Well, in the movie industry this happens multiple times per year. If you lower the budget from the hundred million mark it probably happens dozens of times a year. I don't think there's a parallel for that almost anywhere.
When all the smoke and bullshit clears out[0] it isn't about the technology but rather about a product consumers will want to buy.
[0] Usurping part of a famous line by legendary race car builder Smokey Yunick. I went something like this: "When all the smoke and bullshit clears out you have to get out to the track and race".
Let me give you a little back of the envelope type of breakdown for a feature film (not animated). Average feature length is 90 minutes. Let's say you have all the expensive gear for free (including cameras, grip, lights). Let's also say you have all the locations and sets for free. 'Natural' locations for example - those are the ones that you use locations as-is, like friend's apartment that looks nice, local coffee shop, that kind of stuff. Locations where you can't get the lights exact as you want, but at least they don't need much of, if any set dressing.
Let's also say you are writing your own script (90 minutes / ~90 pages), and you will be doing your own editing, sound design, mixing and mastering, as well as color grading and a few cheap, but semi good-looking vfx shots that you've found tutorials on how to make them from videocopilot or whatever. You can do only a few since they take a lot of time to make. Your friend of a friend will take up distribution and marketing, and your mom will pay the bills and prep food for you during the first few months while you write your script and do location scouting, script lining/breakdown/storyboard and the other stuff needed for pre-production.
Now, you have everything for free - you 'just need to shoot the movie'. What does that entail?
Most optimistic projections for a 90 minute feature-length movies are around 30 days worth of shooting. That's three minutes per day, which might sound little, but is actually a lot. Between each setup (changing camera location), you have to move/change lights, get actors ready and shoot. That takes time.
Here's an optimistic skeleton crew for something decent. On the set you will have yourself as a director, cameraman/director of photography and his assistant (at least one for focus at least, since you're shooting with prime lenses). You will also have a sound mixer and a boom guy (the one with the fishing rod). You will also have two friends who move the lights around and two that will help with grip and set (one will move dolly around, one will arrange apple boxes and help decorate the set. He's a wonderful guy, he can do all of that by himself). You will also have your assistant that will take care of notes for your editing later (a script supervisor) and she will occasionally hit the slate and help the actors with their lines. One other friend will help with make-up and her friend with hair and wardrobe that you borrowed from somewhere too. You will also need your three actors. That's all your innovative script needs. Except those two scenes where you need people sitting near-by them in the coffee shop and that scene where extras are in the public transportation bus around them,, but we won't talk about that.
That's: 1 you, 1 your assistant/scriptie, 1 DP and 1 his assistant, 1 sound guy and 1 boom guy, 2 light guys that also run around with their cars if something needs to be fetched, 2 grip guys that have keen decorating sense to double for set design, 1 make-up girl/guy and 1 hairdresser / wardrobe, 3 actors. That's 15 people.
15 people that will work for 15+ hours for 30 days straight. Of those 15 people, 8 people will need to work two weeks ahead of shoot, also long hours. They will need to prep. Actors will need to read lines, learn them, you will need to block action with them, block action on set, rehearsals, rehearsals... DP and assistant will need to design lighting around locations you've found, scriptie will prep for her notes, make-up and wardrobe will need to prep what will be look of actors.
That's 15 people for 30 days straight, 8 people for 2 weeks straight. For 15+ hour days. You will need to move them around and feed them like babies. Because empty-stomached set is not a good set. And no, you can't eat pizza for 30 days straight. Crafty table also doesn't count as a full meal, which you need if you work for 15+ hours, mostly standing and/or pushing heavy objects.
That's the skeleton indie movie. On the borderline of possible.
Now, take animation. It's kind of the same, but your friends can't help because they can't draw / 3d model, and those that can can't animate. I'm helping a friend finish his ~5 minute animation just these days. With my help and a few others (not full-time, I took few shots from him as well as other's have.), his full-time, 10+ hour days accumulate to about three and a half years. That's on a whole other level of people bottleneck. I actually started out as an animator, then layout artist, then switched to VFX TD (I programmed for a long time, still do for fun) then from there to editing, script and then direction and creative. That's where I'm at today.
edit: you'll also have squabbles after the first week or two, when people are over-worked. You'll hear something like 'Fuck you and your stupid-ass movies. I'm out. Deduct from my pay. That's right, you're not paying, buddy!' and then you will make peace, and you will end the shoot for the day. And after a month+ of emotional rollercoaster you will be alone for a couple of more months in your mother's bedroom editing the movie. While at it, you will look at the shots and then you will have thoughts along the following: 'This scene looks like shit. Look at that damn acting. I shouldn't have listened to what people were suggesting to me on the set'. And you would be right. Along with all of the stress, you will be, due to in-experience, gullible to all of the advices on the set. Everyone has them, from dolly operator to actors. And you will, in your insecurity, listen to them and depart from your vision and settle for a compromise. One that will compromise your original vision and you can't go back once you're in the editing with crappy shots. All of the advisors will be doing other stuff by then, and you will have to take those shots and put your name first on that shit pie. Not theirs, yours. Yet, you weren't calling the shots, you were compromising because you thought you can't make people listen to your vision because you didn't pay them.
His analysis has similar to themes to the misunderstanding of "gatekeepers" like Netflix / Amazon Video / HBO and why they exist.
Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists not having money to self-finance their projects -- and -- also not wanting to mess around with tasks that are unrelated to creativity such as managing a web server farm to distribute their videos to their fans.
There was a recent HN thread where people were frustrated that they had to pay for multiple streaming services (Netflix/Hulu/Amazon) to get all the shows they wanted. Several suggested that we need to move towards a decentralized P2P distribution platform. Unfortunately, as techies and programmers, we don't consider the underlying economic forces that created the centralized gatekeepers in the first place. For example... if director/producer David Fincher wants the highest payment for his project, he can go to Netflix execs and convince them give him $100 million[1]. How would he get that kind of payday from decentralized systems such as IPFS / Sandstorm / DECENT[2]?
[1]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/netflix-outbids-hbo-da...
This exact same argument can also be made wrt Musicians. Justin Bieber has no interest in managing a web server farm to distribute his music to fans. And yet, I'm able to go online and purchase specific Justin Bieber songs/albums that I'm interested in, without having to pay monthly fees to some Netflix-type aggregator.
> Gatekeepers are an emergent property of artists not having money to self-finance their projects
This seems like a much stronger argument, and I agree that making a TV show is vastly more expensive than making songs. But the vast majority of new musicians do not self-finance their first few albums either. They sign up with a record label, and the record label finances the production/marketing/distribution costs. And ultimately, when consumers pay money to buy the songs/albums, a cut of that money goes back to the record company in order for them to recoup their investment.
The exact same model can work for television shows as well. HBO bankrolls David Fincher $100M to produce Utopia. Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO. And as "equity holders", a percentage of that customer money goes back to HBO.
I'm sure there are many other niggling issues that need to be worked out, but at a fundamental level, I don't see why this revised model can't work. Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.
Is that really the case? I'm heavily into the local music scene in my city, I'm friends with loads of musicians, go to shows almost nightly and talk to the bands, etc. Based on my experience most artists do pay for their first couple releases. With the exception of my friends who started their own "label" I only know one band who has any corporate involvement, and even in that case they're only paying to finish an album that was already being worked on.
I pay Spotify so I don't have to deal with a site per band. Going distributed has its costs; especially differences on the UI endpoint for the end-user is something bad, IMO.
Also, self-hosting MP3s is trivial (payment gateways, less so). At worst, you have to throw a couple bucks to a hosting company and hire a guy for couple hours a month to manage it. Hosting videos, however, is much bigger deal.
> Allowing consumers to pay only for the shows that they want to watch, instead of forcing them to pay for an entire monthly bundle, seems like it should be much more economically efficient.
It would be economically efficient, but honestly, I believe economic efficiency is the problem in arts, not the goal. That is, if users are paying for particular movies, then producers are incentivized to invest only in movies that are likely to be paid for. Which creates a feedback loop that promotes dumb, trivial content at expense of something that could be meaningful, but doesn't look sellable from the get-go.
Almost all TV is available from the same sort of places that sell you Beiber songs for a per episode price.
But even the music industry is moving away from that sort of model. Flat fee is more convenient.
Many music lovers subscribe to Spotify which has 30+ million tracks to choose from. However, it doesn't have the Taylor Swift albums because she pulled them. If those customers want to hear Taylor Swift, they have to buy them from Apple Itunes or Amazon Music.
T Swift made a voluntary choice to net her the best paying deal which means digital music customers have to pay for more than one service. Add up thousands of different musicians each looking after their self-interests for the best deal and it ends up creating several intermediaries.
> Customers who want to watch Utopia can pay money just to watch Utopia, without having to sign up for HBO.
It's not about being a monthly subscriber or an on-demand occasional payer -- it's about the mystery of HBO even existing as an intermediary that often puzzles techies.
That said, the film industry is very much built on sentiment and brand. I'm a fan of movies from all eras, so I don't understand why people are so thrilled to pay money to see a new movie when there are so many great movies in the past few decades, nevermind the past year. But people today really want to see Jennifer Lawrence's new work, no matter how many other equally great actresses have had great roles in years past.
Same deal with franchises, in movies and in games. A fan-remake could remove Nintendo characters and assets and still have the exact same game mechanics and quality, but very few people would give a shit. We want to see the characters and worlds we grew up with and loved, regardless of whether the actual vehicle (movie, game, etc) isn't particularly noteworthy.
Edit: Contrast film with other industries that have been disrupted. I like Seymour Hersh, but I don't care if a great investigative reporting scoop comes from him or from a blogger, I just care about its veracity and impact. Same with software; John Resig seems like a great human being but that's not the main reason for jquery's dominance. Meanwhile, if Star Wars Force Awakens refused Harrison Ford's demands and put someone else in as Han Solo, people would not be so accepting.
Note: I'm not saying the union is bad. It's probably more useful to see the strength of the union as a reflection of the inherent strength and value that actors wield in moviemaking.
"Since 1990 the earnings of the top leading actors have increased exponentially while the salaries of nearly all other actors have been systematically driven down. In many cases, the earnings of established character actors have been rolled back by 60-70 percent. This occurs, in large part, because the working professional (as opposed to the star) is at a disadvantage when negotiating in the new corporatized production environment. We do not possess a unique, marketable (and often media exploited) brand, and consequently lack the power to make or break the existence or profitability of a film. Consequently, respected, veteran actors with numerous credits and hard-earned “quotes” now routinely receive “take-it-or-leave it” offers, often at “scale”—a beginners wage."
Like the author of the original piece I don't think this situation is very stable.
But if John Resig released something new that isn't jquery, and does a useful thing, it would immediately be a lot more popular than if Random Joe Programmer releases the same useful thing.
Celebrity does work in the programming world as well.
It's a type of distribution channel. The more eyes are on you, the more audience you can pull, the more successful your projects are going to be. If for no other reason than more people giving them a shot and seeing what's up.
Let's imagine that a group of immensely talented and attractive folks have a brilliant video series idea, manage to attract the technical resources and funding to bootstrap it, and it becomes a hit on YouTube. Granted, that's a fantasy scenario, because as much as YouTube has democratized video-making, it is absolutely dominated by corporate content [1].
What's more likely, that this plucky group remains on the independent path while continuing to remain popular? Or that they choose to join the club and follow the rules so that their revenue and exposure can increase by several orders of magnitude? It's not just the movie-making part of film that is entrenched, it's the distribution networks that have longstanding ways of doing business, things that occasionally piss people off here (region-locked content).
On the other side of things, there isn't much motion like there is in tech, e.g. Facebook and its open source projects. The only thing that comes to mind in entertainment (besides actors doing stints at Shakespeare in the Park) is Louis C.K. setting up his own production and distribution channel. The work is great, but it is definitely not scalable in any forseeable way [2]
[0] http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?view2=worldwide&y...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_viewed_YouTube_vi...
[2] http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/4/10918924/louis-ck-horace-an...
As for old vs. new movies, I guess I go to cinemas because a) good, big screen and loud audio gives an experience that I can't reproduce at home, and b) cinemas generally don't play old movies! And even if they did, then c) old movies I can stream/Torrent on-demand, it's the new movies that are difficult to get. As for the reason to go see them vs. wait until they're streamable on-line, it's social objects again - when I go and watch the new Avengers movie while it's still in cinemas, I can join the conversation with my friends who just watched it too.
For me, it's HD. Old movies look... old.
I can appreciate classics like Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and the Deer Hunter, but I generally don't have 3+ contiguous hours to do anything anymore let alone watch a movie and I feel ashamed I can't honor such works with a proper, conscious viewing either. For "pop" arthouse movies closer to something like Begotten or Valhalla Rising, the effort to get value is even worse because I am not understanding what the symbols are and it becomes more of an exercise in "let's analyze scenes!" than "let's watch a movie to stimulate our minds." Some people don't like video games for similar reasons I feel - they want passive, decision-free entertainment.
It looks old the same way an old photograph looks old. The colors are all off: The jokes aged. The sound seems weird. The special effects - even if they were amazing at the time - were off. The movies were obviously made for a different time.
Granted, there are exceptions - a few movies age well, but the vast majority do not.
Chances are, though, your movie is crap (as 95% of anything is) so nobody is going to want to see it anyway.
Also familiar with DRM.
Still have GP's original question. What is disrupting hollywood mean?
Want to see what disruption of a formerly 'high barrier' artistic industry looks like? Photography. I'm pretty sure the ubiquity of cameras and the assists and tricks and filters that are available now have had a significant impact on the income of professional photographers.
The last elephant in the room is that a large swath of people who attempt creative endeavors drastically over estimate their talent and under estimate the amount of work a polished product takes. Everybody has to start somewhere, sure. I've just noticed the modern mindset a little more expecting praise rather than understanding it needs to be earned sometimes and then crying about bullying when valid criticism comes rolling in (see: either Corey Feldman performance on the Today Show this year).
I agree in general. On the other hand, Youtube shows that less polished can be enjoyable as well. This provides more and smoother ways for amateurs to level up in skill and/or professionalism. Those who survive Youtube criticism probably have a thick skin.
I think the 'distribution' of film has genuinely been disrupted (I recall the days on dial-up ouch) as Netflix moving from DVDs to streaming revenue indicates. The content creation though? Much bigger picture. It will take a lot of little disruptions to add up to something major, because the current model, well, just works for now.
At the end of the day though the "industry" part of film or music or whatever really doesn't give a shit what they are selling as long as they are making a handsome profit on whatever it is.
While large tech companies are great at attracting talent, that doesn't create a dearth of talent going into smaller startups. The driver here is Part 1: the capital requirements for any high-quality project are huge and up-front. And as entertainment is getting increasingly saturated, there's no real way for a "unicorn" franchise to be born out of an indie flick. No upstart VC will take a bet on you making the next Star Wars, even if you're already an industry insider... and in that case, per the OP, it's much more reliable for you to work within the current system. And on top of that, industry fundamentals don't look good: from one of the links in Part 4, https://redef.com/original/the-future-of-film-part-i-us-film... .
Perhaps film is truly an industry in decline, and the disruption is already happening - not from Netflix and other content producers, but in the form of interactivity and mainstream gaming. Perhaps the monetization model there is simply better. Time will tell.
The same thing has to happen in the movie industry. This is happening, but slowly.
Final Draft costs $249 for a text editor, and Amazon is creating a cloud version for free. You can take a lot of interesting shots with drones that would have costs lots of money to shoot with a helicopter in the past.
There will come a day when someone can create an MVP of their movie using animation software on there iPad. Use this to spark imagination in investors and produce a full movie at much lower cost because all the shots have been fully planned.
The fundamental problem is in my opinion we want folks with millions on the line to not act like rational actors but instead do it 'for the art'... this will happen from time to time but will not really be the norm i think.
You can make films, and release them to the public, without involving Hollywood (called "the film industry" in this article, which is just as incorrect as calling the 5 major record labels "the music industry", though not 100% inaccurate) right now. I don't understand where the "disruption" part comes in. As far as I can tell, it's already been disrupted...
Youtube? Piracy? Online streaming? Digital cameras?
Bigger tent pole movies are still traditional becuase theyre less art and more so investment sschemes. Nobody wants disruption there: thats for quirky indie mmmovis
https://www.statista.com/statistics/297533/sony-sales-worldw...
I have a full-length feature on DVD on Amazon recorded on DV.
Walking dead. Putting out comic books in film is just a symptom.
Isn't that part 4? http://endcrawl.com/blog/film-not-disrupted-yet-part-4/
The article notes a lot of things about the film industry which have analogies with industries in other mediums. (Note the parallels with the game industry!)
Fifteen years ago, TV shows was what housewives view, and something you can throw in when no blockbusters are on the screen.
Today, movies are laughable. Characters are so unnatural. Plots are so old. FX take so much screen time. On top of that they're so awfully long while lacking enough detail and consideration. TV shows are so much superior these days it's not even funny.
On the other hand, it's an extremely successful crowdfunding effort, and still probably didn't make anybody any real money. In fact some people paid to be in it. And being a pastiche of bad movies allows a lot of latitude in production value. It's incredibly impressive for the budget, but no serious film would work with those production values. It's also a third of the length of a feature film.
Lol irl
