The Disintermediation of Film Making
Over the last few years I’ve been watching and learning what effects the web is having on business, on society, on people. As I learn, there are all these new words, ideas and technologies that are floating around in my head like podcasting, videoblogging, Web Services, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Salesforce On-Demand Architecture, open source, virtualisation, vendor relationship management, gestures, and more. Everyday is like one of those tests where you have to find the odd one out from a set of shapes. As time goes on these various things accumulate in my head, some get thrown by the wayside, but for some unknown reason others clump together because they seem related in some way.
The one big idea that I keep coming back to is the Internet as the Great Disintermediator: the disintermediation of the aggregators and repackagers of the world. I keep wondering how this idea applies to film. How will film making become disintermediated? A few experiences over the weekend have helped me get closer to the answer to this question.
I was at Podcastcon UK over the weekend. I don’t have a podcast and I’m not a videoblogger but I find both of these activities so interesting that I thought I should go down there just to see what people were talking about and also to be in an environment where others understood this interest [most of my friends think I’m mad].
What’s funny was that the panel sessions that I thought I would find least interesting ended up being the best ones and the ones I was really looking forward to ended up being a bit of a disappointment. The Creative Podcasting session in the end became a session about advertising and the Citizen Journalism segment ended up being a discussion about nomenclature and old media techniques applied to podcasting.
It was the Business of Podcasting panel that surprised me the most. This was all about how people were using podcasting within the corporate space to expand and often to diversify their business. One example was Tom Hall from the Lonely Planet who explained how they were using podcasts to compliment their travel books with travel casts of various locations around the world as well as using user generated audio from travellers moving around the globe.
Last night after I posted about the Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary, I was pondering why it was that I had found that so powerful and why it was that the seemingly boring Business of Podcasting Panel had turned out, imho, to have been the most creative. It suddenly dawned upon me that the first question to answer shouldn’t be ‘how’, rather why should we disintermediate film making in the first place? If everybody could make films easily, why would they do it at all?
Making films is about telling a story. It’s about getting ideas from inside your head into someone else’s. Loosely speaking, the film landscape tends to have factual documentaries on one edge and fictional films at the other and there’s obviously lots of mixing in the middle. Now although there are plenty of people who create fantastic fictional film work, I would imagine that for most of the people on the planet, it would be far more useful if they could quickly, cheaply and easily use the medium of film to put across an idea in business.
It’s very hard with words alone to put across an idea that has been building in your head over many months, sometimes years to someone (perhaps a boss, or investor) who has not met the people you’ve met, not read the articles you have, not payed attention to the people you find influential. Making money by the disintermediation of the film making process is going to be made by giving people a way to make their profession easier. In the future CEO’s will be film makers.
Who knows, maybe there will come the day when you can walk around putting bits of media in your pocket as you roam and you then seamlessly use this accumulated media stuff to tell stories to your friends around the table down the pub in glorious 3D hologram. Fictional story telling is for fun, thank goodness.
December 8th, 2006 at 10:47 am
[…] I picked this quote from Susan Buice because it made my laugh. It’s part of an interview she did with Arin Crumbley with whom she runs Four Eyed Monsters. Go read the interview and pay attention to these guys because they are doing interesting things. Arin is responsible for the Open Source Documentary about Net Neutrality that I wrote about a while back. That piece of work and a few other things that were happening to me at the time all converged together helping me to form new ideas about film making, documentary making and more generally how the web is turning things on their head. Ultimately it lead to my mini-essay on the disintermediation of film making. Now while I think and talk about these things Arin and Susan are out there actually doing cool stuff. I think you should pay them some attention and others do to. […]
February 18th, 2008 at 1:13 am
Great reading… and good observations.
You’re right about the notion of how future CEOs will be filmmakers. It’s not such a weird idea., and not just for CEOs telling their company story, but *anyone* wanting to tell their own story. It’s all about good personal branding in today’s Web 2.0 world.
Although many people may not be suited for video blogging - in that the delivery process of speaking in front of the camera is a vastly different process from that of writing - it is arguably a similar concept. But raw, unedited video blogging - as a “diary” form - is akin to a stream-of-conscience written monolog. Rarely do people publish a blog post without any editing at all, because rarely do the words flow perfectly the first time. The same is likely the case with video blogging; how many can “nail it” the first time? But this is off the point.
There are currently resources popping up for posting/hosting video-based resume support, and I’m all in favor of this concept. After all, it’s human beings who are behind those resumes, and human beings - not resumes - who wind up working with a company. A complementary video accompanying a text-based resume allows a potential employer to see more about who they really are, and allows employees to show more than what their resume will convey. The video can make their story richer.
Of course, as we are currently in an employee-driven market, employers *also* need to put on the proverbial suit and tie, and dress to impress. Employers are being interviewed as much as the employees, in this day and age. So a compelling story about the employer also needs telling, and one of the best ways can be video.
–Steve Lovelace
http://www.buildabetterbox.com
http://www.movingpix.com