{"id":1298,"date":"2016-08-04T18:41:24","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T18:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2022-05-25T17:27:47","modified_gmt":"2022-05-25T17:27:47","slug":"film-not-disrupted-yet-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/film-not-disrupted-yet-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Film has not been Disrupted (Yet), Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry is part 2\u00a0in\u00a0a series examining why the film industry has resisted disruption so far:<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Making a movie is still an all-or-nothing proposition.<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. Film technologists are focusing on all the wrong areas.<\/strong><\/li>\n
  3. Filmmaking is computationally expensive<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. We are a deeply traditional, conservative, and sentimental lot<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  5. The film industry neutralizes its best and brightest<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  6. Postscript:<\/strong>\u00a0There Are Always Two Revolutions<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \n

    2. Film technologists are focusing on all the wrong areas.<\/h2>\n

    Film technologists naturally gravitate towards production.<\/p>\n

    This makes sense: production where the action is. On my first-ever set gig, I wanted to be as close to that\u00a0action as possible.\u00a0So I ingratiated myself to the all-German film crew by wearing the same soccer\u00a0T-shirt to set for 3 or 4 days in a row. By week two, I’d graduated from Location Intern to Camera PA.<\/p>\n

    \"At<\/p>\n

    At that point I also put on a fresh shirt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    Production tech\u00a0is also\u00a0where many of the most challenging problems lie. Things\u00a0like image compression, camera colorimetry, and HDR color space encoding are still very much live,\u00a0difficult, and interesting fields. You can build\u00a0careers there.<\/p>\n

    But\u2014as I never tire of pointing out\u201415 years of disrupting production technology has\u00a0also\u00a0failed to make any significant changes to the film business itself.\u00a0Final Cut Pro didn\u2019t disrupt film, it disrupted NLEs. The DVX-100 didn’t disrupt film, it started the disruption of cameras. And LED lighting panels may be disruptive if you’re an electrician, but they have not unseated any major studios so far.<\/p>\n

    (And I would include “the 8th studio<\/a>” in that statement as well. There may be plenty of indie film capital in the world, your access to it depends on many factors with little bearing on the merit of your film project itself.)<\/p>\n

    NLEs, cameras, Israeli Arms, cool control panels, C-stands, and compression algorithms are all\u00a0individual pieces\u00a0of the massive supply chain feeding our actual end product: content. You know, movies\u00a0and\u00a0TV shows\u00a0and stuff.<\/p>\n

    But those of us who\u00a0live and\u00a0breathe production tech keep losing this plot.\u00a0We confuse\u00a0our little pieces of the supply chain with the end product\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n

    One\u00a0frequent response I\u2019ve heard to the first entry<\/a>\u00a0in this series is: \u201cFilm hasn’t\u00a0been disrupted? Tell that to the VFX industry<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

    But this\u00a0happens to precisely illustrate my point. The film VFX\u00a0industry is widely seen as beleaguered<\/a> and exploited by\u00a0an effective monopsony. (The studio system, taken as a whole, being the\u00a0sole buyer in the market.) This reality underscores the\u00a0premise that technology innovation notwithstanding, the film industry\u2019s underlying power structures have so far not been shaken.<\/p>\n

    To that end, technologists need to look up from their foxholes and start thinking about other pieces in the value chain. As we do so, we should\u00a0be cribbing from\u00a0the\u00a0playbooks of\u00a0disruptors in other fields. This is exactly what Netflix and Amazon have done. (I’ll get to them but for now, I’ll simply state that I consider them Film 1.5 companies, not Film 2.0.)<\/p>\n

    But there is some movement in this area. Slated<\/a>, The Black List<\/a>, and Seed & Spark<\/a> are re-thinking the idea of development<\/em>\u00a0in the connected age.\u00a0And the distribution<\/em> space is a crowded and noisy one, with Vimeo’s\u00a0acquisition<\/a> of VHX just one of the latest examples.<\/p>\n

    As long as we stay\u00a0focused on tricking out our gear, no matter how fun and exciting that may be, we’ll\u00a0be doing nothing to change the underlying economics of visual storytelling. It’s time for film technologists to\u00a0aim higher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Film technologists so far have focused on disrupting production technology. That’s a start, but it won’t be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,9,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3253,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions\/3253"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}