The latest installment of Jamie Stuart's Tools & Technology columnWell, so much for that. Hope you enjoyed it. And I'm sure you never even realized it was over.
Trends rarely last longer than 4-5 years, so by that measurement this recent burst of online DIY activity is finished. By my estimation, this trend in film culture and filmmaking encompassed the period spanning roughly from 2002-2007, give or take.
During the winter following 9/11, I recall being stuck in a friend's car with somebody I'd never met before or since explaining that everything was now being reset: the economy was crashing, the culture had just gone through a shock, and now was the time to jump in and make things happen.
My first website MovieNavigator.org premiered in August 2002. I ran it with my friend Shaun Sages, who handled movie reviews while I hit the junkets for interviews. This was before most film sites shifted to the blog form, so we ran it in a more traditionally sectioned manner. Movie City News went online around the same time and we were lucky to get picked up now and again for a link. The climate was so open that after being online for only a few weeks both Shaun and I were easily accredited by the New York Film Festival as press. Two years later, in '04, Graham Leggat, then with Lincoln Center, granted me special permission to create my first web-series at the NYFF42 — a series that was genuinely radical and unique for its time.
By last year's NYFF, embarking on my sixth year in attendance (fourth shooting video), both novelties that I'd jumped on were by any standards cliché. Not only could anybody and everybody shoot video at the press conferences but there were so many upstart websites and blogs that the press office began rejecting accreditation applications.
During this same period, sites like MySpace and YouTube surfaced offering users the ability to generate their own content within the context of a community. Once both of these companies were bought, their respective owners immediately began studying what was so successful about the user-generated content and culture to mine it for profit. And ultimately, what's happened is that the DIY aesthetic that came about during this brief explosion (not unlike indie film/music in the early-'90s) has been co-opted by the professional media and subtly marketed back to the community without its consciousness of this take-over. Just like switching tracks on a train.
As it now stands, the infrastructure is in place for the traditional industry to flex its muscle over internet content. Distribution of film will be controlled more or less by the same people who've always controlled it. In fact, they'll probably be able to exert greater control than ever simply by owning their own streaming or direct-to-download services, and their profit margins will explode. On the web-series front, the major content producers now act just like regular production companies and will not accept any unsolicited (i.e.: user-generated) material — only pitches that come through agency or legal representation.
I'm not pointing out any of this as criticism. It's just the way things are. Two and a half years ago, when "MySpace: The Movie" generated millions of hits, both MySpace and YouTube could tout its creators to generate publicity for themselves. Now, even old music videos from the 1980s have amassed millions of hits on YouTube.
My initial feelings about the internet being the future for artists seeking exposure was correct. And I don't expect that to change. There are still plenty of sites whose sole purpose is to offer a forum for emerging talent, and there will still be breakouts. Ultimately, depending which way net neutrality goes, I would expect to see filmmaking on the web resemble the same studio/independent dichotomy we've become accustomed to in theatrical and home video markets. Also, the emergence of successful web-based feature production companies selling direct downloads and DVD/Blu-ray seems like a given — so long as they can find a proper budget/sales model. (With prosumer cameras now coming in 1080p, I'd think five-figures is a safe budget to start with.) As subjects diversify, marketing will be able to target websites with similar interests, not just movie-related forums.
The fact is, history will treat this phase as one of the most important in the progression of the moving picture. Not only was it a living document of the transition from analog to digital (both in the making of movies and the journalism that covers them), but it also represented the moment when filmmaking finally reached the level of "pencil and paper."
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart has developed shorts for several years through his production business, The Mutiny Company. Working almost entirely on his own, Stuart has carved out his own niche in the film community, documenting the festival environment with experimental shorts for Movie City News, Filmmaker magazine, Focus Features and others. In this series of columns, Jamie examines the way that new technologies have aided his personal adventures in filmmaking. Read his last entry here.