Today’s guest post is by John Bradburn.
Why do kids make music and not films? It’s a right of passage for teenagers up and down the land to jump in a van and travel the length of the country with instruments to play shows. These same kids save up to buy guitars and record demos. They may not make a profit but they enjoy the ride. I want to know why this doesn’t happen with filmmakers. What are the barriers to grassroots film exhibition or Film Gigging and what can we learn from the model most bands work on?
Kids don’t make films. For the cost of a set of instruments you could buy a digital camera and a laptop. Four people can make a film quite easily and with the same level of technological skill needed to record and mix a demo. But kids don’t. Jean Cocteau famously stated that film would only be an art when its materials were as cheap as pen and paper. Well now it’s certainly as cheap as an Ibenez guitar.
The film industry looks like the music industry if we thought we could only record songs with orchestras in the Albert Hall. There is no lo-fi film circuit. There are small budget shorts but 95% are aiming at the mainstream. There are even less film ‘labels’ that fund and distribute films like albums. CDs and DVDs are physically the same. If you can get an album reviewed you can get a film reviewed. So logically there should be an equal amount of indie film labels as there are music labels.
