{"id":1359,"date":"2016-08-09T16:44:03","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T16:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/?p=1359"},"modified":"2022-05-25T17:27:47","modified_gmt":"2022-05-25T17:27:47","slug":"film-not-disrupted-yet-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/endcrawl.com\/blog\/film-not-disrupted-yet-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Film has not been Disrupted (Yet), Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry is part 3\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<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  3. Filmmaking is (computationally) expensive.<\/strong><\/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

    3. Filmmaking is (computationally) expensive.<\/h2>\n

    Filmed entertainment is expensive. Not just in terms of dollars: it\u2019s computationally expensive<\/em> as well. This simple reality has placed many obstacles in the ways that we conceive of and produce movies and television.<\/p>\n

    Venkatesh Rao\u00a0has written at length<\/a> about the “mass flourishing” made possible by distributed, open collaboration in the software world. So much code today is shared, forked, and redistributed that it\u2019s virtually unthinkable to create a piece of software from scratch today. Filmmakers, meanwhile,\u00a0are perpetually re-inventing the wheel.<\/p>\n

    \"If<\/p>\n

    If you\u2019ve ever installed a game on Steam, you know exactly what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    Rao argues that this trend gradually moving into all other arenas. (Also known as \u201csoftware eating the world\u201d). And he\u2019s right. For a better introduction, I highly recommend two essays: Getting Reoriented<\/a>\u00a0and Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    But computer code always had one large\u00a0advantage: it generally consists of small, lightweight text files that are\u00a0easy to share and distribute. And that was the case decades ago, even when ancient\u00a0dial-up modems still used terms like baud<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    The primitives of filmmaking, other other hand, are of a different sort: bulky binary files weighing in at megabytes per frame, tens or hundreds of megabytes per second. Indie films routinely generate tens of terabytes<\/em> of data. Our raw materials are orders of magnitude larger those from\u00a0other fields like journalism, software, or music. And unlike text files, these\u00a0cannot be easily diffed and forked.<\/p>\n

    Likewise, the computational expense is significant. Compiling your code might take a while, you don\u2019t know true pain until you\u2019ve had to run several grain reduction passes on a 16mm film.<\/p>\n

    \"With<\/p>\n

    With sincere apologies to Randall Munroe<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

    So we find multiple, overlapping factors\u00a0that have helped keep disruption at bay:<\/span><\/p>\n