Mike Jones Digital Basin
screen media rinse cycle

The status quo maintenance persists.....

It's very easy to fall into thinking that the cinema industries are pushed along by a hunger for the power and flexibility of new technology and technical innovation. From where we sit in a binary pool of software and digital hardware and RED ONE cameras and solid-state recording and so on, you could be forgiven for thinking that the film industry is the foremost embracer of new technology.

The truth however is that the film industry has most often been painfully slow to accept new technology, extremely slow to change or adapt or engage with new opportunities and oftentimes deliberately resistant to evolution and 'better' ways of working. Indeed it might be said that it has an overt preference for the status quo.

This interesting interview below explores this conundrum whereby, on one hand, 'cinema-is-technology' and does not exist without technology and yet on the other, the industry has consistently rejected, avoided and rallied against technological change.





Established cinema has rejected Digital for years and yet there is no doubt that celluloid is a dead format (sooner rather than later). Traditional cinema fought against the NLE and computer editing and it took Avid and its competitors a decade or more to be  accepted. Broadcast stations are still absurdly  adamant that they cant function without a $200,000 hardware editing system despite the fact that HD can be onlined in real-time on a laptop. Im still baffled when i see TV news shot 4:3 despite the fact that the takeup of widescreen TV's has been incredibly rapid and letterboxing is commonly accepted. There are a thousand of these little things that, to me as a digital native, seem curiously silly and yet are maintained seemingly through little more than habit and precedent.

Now of course that's a red flag to the proverbial bull, and a I fully expect comments to flood in decrying those 'young whippernspappers' who dont 'edit right', spilling the usual bullshit about 'industry standards' or making verbose comments about 'discipline' as if working 'tediously' and 'slowly' and 'clumsily' and 'expensively' was somehow better and 'more creative'.

With just a slight pinch of deliberate provocation i declare that cinema should not be expensive, should no be complex, should not be wasteful. I declare that cinema  should not take 100 people, need a $200,000 camera or require a edit suite the size of a industrial kitchen.

This isnt a dogme manifesto rerun (Im actually not a fan of dogme films; oftentimes just an excuse for lazy filmmaking) but it is a call for established moving image media to wake up and smell the bloody coffee. The studios seem fiercely holding on to a business model serving nothing but their own prestige and executive job titles -a exec producer can only demand an exorbitant salary if the film they are producing costs an exorbitant amount to make. It's actually in the studio's best interests to make ridiculously expensive films, even if they flop, because its the only way to justify their existence.

And the broadcast stations are even more archaicly absurd - head up their arse so far they cant fathom that TV news reporting DOES NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES NEED a $50,000 camera. Hire more actual journalists and use cheap HDV or XDCAMEX cameras with stories edited on laptops. Do the stations REALLY, TRULY think viewers at home give a flying rats arse about the image quality difference in their nightly news????

And why do so many indie filmmakers still, despite the digital opportunities of the 21st century, find themselves longing to shoot 16mm or 35mm film. Ploughing thousands of dollars into wasteful celluloid development costs and stock when that money could be spent on something that will actually make their film BETTER - Better actors, Better locations, HEAVEN FORBID MORE TIME DEVELOPING THE SCRIPT rather than shooting half-baked trash.

This is my rant for the day. We are drowning in digital opportunity but the archaic backward thinking, absurd mentality of status quo maintenance persists.....

Posted at 03:14PM Jul 03, 2009 by Mike Jones in industry comment  |  Comments[1]