Joss Whedon's New Media Adventures

If you haven't seen this, and apparently I'm a bit behind in jumping on this bandwagon; you must watch, and if you like, buy.


*side note - I can't figure out for the life of me why the creative folks out there don't go into productions that take at least *some* level of professional effort, like Dr. Horrible, and set up some minimal merchandising before release.

In this case, it would have been simple to upload a few "Dr. Horrible" images for t-shirts and coffee mugs from someplace like CafePress and with the show's popularity taking off, it could have been a bonanza.

Anyway, point is, it's just too easy, and too low-cost to *not* make elements like these part of the deliverables for new media shows.

The Gamechanger

I've mentioned this a few times over the last 2 years, the changing landscape of our business, and the major technological advances made in the entertainment industry since my arrival here in 1997.

This article from Wired is about one of my favorite current subjects, the RED camera.

I was fortunate enough to be on the frontend of the digital cinema revolution here in Hollywood, with one of my first producing jobs being the Sundance film fest short, shot by Allen Daviau; where we shot with the then "new" Sony VX1000 MiniDV camera in PAL format for an experimental short film that ended up at the Sundance Film Festival in 2001.

"Sweet" was my second producing job ever, following on the heels of an over-inflated 20 minute short film shot on SUPER35mm film where the filming and post production were both challenging, slow, and about as expensive as you could get working in film. The opportunity to work on "Sweet," as I look back, really did seem like a coming-of-age moment. If I remember right, it was that year that Apple's Final Cut Pro first came out as well.

This was the year I was still working at New Line Cinema in post production where we still would use a sync block and a film splicer to cut film and then tape it back together, and a flatbed to view it on. I was 24. To be fair, this stuff was on the way out, and Avid's were fully in use. The fact remained that we had this gear in the offices and it was used.

This was also the year The Orphanage first began testing their "film look" process as a service that eventually made it's way to a plug-in for software. Their major contribution to the film is reflected in their "presenting" credit to this day on "Sweet."

While what we achieved with that film was just a sliver of what RED now represents, it's encouraging to finally see our industry really embrace this type of change. I hope someday soon the productivity and cost/benefit gains that this camera represents will extend into the actual physical production processes that happen at the organizational level of making films & television. We're still struggling with antiquated, crummy software that doesn't allow for quick, easy, cross platform sharing of the information we use to schedule and budget projects. Those budgets and schedules are often the things that make a project work, or fail, and well... we're still failing there. (side note: There are a few options for this, but they are expensive, and kludgy; this is, of course, something I've been working on for some time, and there's good stuff happening behind-the-scenes:)

It's interesting to see RED finally hit the mainstream (if WIRED is mainstream? I like to think so...), and it will be a gamechanger for Panavision and Sony. Thankfully, Kodak saw the writing on that wall a couple of years ago and began realigning it's businesses appropriately. (though I never will forget one of the preeminent film labs in town taking Allen and I out to a Lakers game with some sweet box tickets and treating us to an awesome dinner (thanks John!) and talking about how Allen liked to call up Kodak and ask for specific emulsions on his film stock to experiment with...).

Only 4 months ago, I was approached by two new-to-Hollywood young filmmakers contemplating their first short film project who were looking for an "old hand" to guide them through their production. Their first undertaking? They had gotten on the waiting list and bought their own first full RED package, lenses, support gear, and all. No more begging for free or discounted gear from Panavision or Arriflex (Otto Nemenz) they were out to produce their own cinema quality films, on their own terms. I hope, and believe we'll only see more of this.

Personally, I can't wait to buy my first RED package one of these days (though by that time, it'll likely be 6k, or 8k...).

Panavision Camera? $25,000/month to rent
Red Camera? $17,500 to own

A new generation of storytellers with the tools to tell their own stories in grand cinematic vision?

Priceless.

Latest

Couple weeks ago, got an interesting call to put together something for MyDamnChannel, and below is the result.



I have to say, I'm pretty happy with the result, if not perfect. Terrell, J and Paul were all a pleasure to work with, and they made it easy, and 13,000+ views in 2 days online? That's not bad either!

It's also a cool format idea to have celebs sit down and have a conversation with each other and see what they say and we had fun making it:)

UPDATE: 9-15-08
WOW! In a little over a month, this first of two episodes has racked up over 200,000 views. That's pretty rockin'!

Seek First to Understand

A game creator recently took the brave step of directly asking people who pirate his games, why they do so, and to open a dialogue with them about it. (as an exercise, anywhere you see the word "game" replace it with movie or television show and chew on that a while).

A few days ago I posted a simple question on my blog. "Why do people pirate my games?". It was an honest attempt to get real answers to an important question... This is what I found:

Introduction

Firstly it's worth pointing out that there were LOTs of responses (and they are still coming in now), hundreds of comments on the sites listed, a ton of comments on the blog (despite it crumbling under the strain) and hundreds of emails made it through to me. I read every one of them.... Here is what they said:

The semi-political ones

I got a few people churning out long arguments about whether or not intellectual property is valid, and claiming that it was censorship, or fascism and other variations on this theme...

Money

A lot of anger was directed at the retail $60 games, and console games. My games were $19-23, but for a lot of people, it was claimed this was far too high. People talked a lot about impulse buying games if they were much cheaper.

Game Quality

This was a big complaint too. And this also surprised me. Not a single person said they had felt ripped off by a game due to substandard visuals or lack of content. The consensus was that games got boring too quickly, were too derivative, and had gameplay issues. Almost everyone had a tale of a game that was bought based on hype which turned out to be disappointing.

DRM

People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.

There's more on his site, go read it.

Today, he posted his conclusions, and they are an excellent window into the things the market that we create and sell film, television and music for.

It's worth reading the summary of responses, and what he's going to do about it.

There's a good lesson to be learned here.

I Have Seen the Future of Storytelling

This post on TechCrunch shows video from a new 3d engine that does all it's rendering in "the cloud" and provides for photoreal environments ostensibly to be used for gaming.

What I see in this demo video? I see shooting a scene on a deserted stretch of Pacific Coast Highway (as shown in the video) without the cost of police, shutting down the highway, all my lighting crew and camera crew and bringing in talent to do voices that are blithely happy they don't have to sit through make up, sit through lighting changes, etc in order to act their roles.

With tools like this it won't matter how much money you do or don't have, it will matter how well you create characters, and write, and set up your shots to convey the emotions you want in your story.

This is my prognostication - OTOY, and cloud rendering that makes any photoreal environment available anytime for the purpose of telling story, will radically change our art.