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This is a vlog pondering the future of cinema in an internet world. It is more or less an excuse to hear Joni sing about Canada and experiment with some fragments of Moby Dick project. Since the project is taking so long (I’m at about 280 pages and frames… so I’m only a bout a third of the way through) I wanted to vlog a sort of stock for what will be the making of video. I’m acutually remixing from the i-movie of “I Drew Pictures” Vid. The “success” of that cllip got me thinking about why that vid touched a nerve and what that might say about future cinema: my own and the cinema at large. I don’t want the blog to slip into sounding like Caheirs de Wired… and I’m no where near as clever as Truffaut and Goddard and the rest of those French boys, but I have been thinking about internet films (or whatever it is that I do which in my semiotic days we would have just called text… or maybe linked text? I guess they call it New Media and leave it at that… maybe even because its so vague).
I spent some time on Youtube the other day where people can get a million hits with just talking head vids… getting by on personality alone. Some of it is funny,or interesting, or weird, but it got me thinking that at some point internet cinema is going to have to (or it’s going to do it anyway) grow up. By this I mean there’s going to have to be a business plan and a revenue stream if content is ever going to get beyond people acting silly and yammering about mostly other people’s videos. It’s going to have to tell complex stories. It’s going to have to have fiction and by this I mean actors and STORY and by this I mean writers. It’s going to have to move beyond the talking head and become cinema. Lately I’ve been thinking about cinema, which is to say in the same breath: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about money. In order to do more than just sit in a room talking to yourself, I mean the minute you start dealing with actors and decent sound and a location, you need a few bucks in your pocket. How will the new media creator get paid in an age beyond mechanical reproduction? What is the market for new media art in the age of digital means of production and reproduction? Clearly I haven’t a clue, but I’m hoping people will leave comments and help me to think about some of these questions.
(in progress?)
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