If you’ve been reading this blog you probably already recognize the old indie filmmaking model is obsolete. You’ve been trying to figure out how to shift from a focus on mass-market storytelling to one of niche audience world-building. You recognize that you need to build extensions, collaborations, and expansive discovery nodes into you storyworld architecture. And of course you know that the only logical response to this world of inexpensive high-production value abundance of content is to be more prolific, more ubiquitous, and thus radically collaborative. We recognize that the analogue era was about perfection and completion, but the digital one is about iterations and evolutions. You know all of this. You live it and you breathe it — but have you allowed it to truly alter your creative practice?
I know how hard it is to embrace change. I know that old practices die hard, that we value what we already own more than it is ever truly worth. The great freedom and opportunity that the drop in the cost of production and distribution has given us also often leads us to think that making stuff is enough. It isn’t though. Not now. And that attitude to “just do it” curses us. And curses all those around us whom we too believe in. We are hurting each other and our culture by continuing our output without rebuilding both our infrastructure and our art forms.
And temptation, privilege, and opportunity frequently conspire to corrupt us to do just what we can — instead of what we must. Maybe a star will do your movie. Your buddies believe in you and will make the film for you for next to nothing. Maybe a financier will even fund your flick. And your Uncle Ernie has that cabin in the woods. Why shouldn’t you shoot when you can?
We have to recognize that the challenge now is not how to get a film made, but how to get it seen. All of us are being force-fed the most splendid chocolate day in and day out. Yes, it is death by chocolate and death by excess. What once was sweet should now be painfully bitter. That chocolate I am referring to is our movies, our culture. As glorious as it is, the excess of it has, changed it’s taste, and we no longer recognize it for the pleasure it is.
We can get hold of anything anytime anywhere on any device – and if we want, we can get it for free. In our world of plenty, value decreases as a matter of course. It may be plenty good, but if it is plenty, we begin to suspect it. When we have so many movies that we can watch five star masterpieces five times a week well beyond the day we will one day die without ever having to pay a penny, we have to ask “why do we need more movies?”
We need more movies because we need films that are about the world we live in and the experiences we are now having. We need more movies because it is incredibly hard to talk about the things we feel most intensely – and most likely always will be; movies help us start that difficult conversation. In an era of abundance, access, and distraction, we need to foster deeper and longer engagement, great identification, and authentic participation with authentic stories. The film form, in its stand-alone one-off manner, will no longer suffice to provide most of this.
The change starts when we begin to tell our story. The set up for our movies have to change before the movies themselves will. We can’t let our pitches further the myth that a good story well told is what is needed today. We have to change how we pitch to embrace both content and form as it can be today.
And tomorrow I will explore how we can do that….
