Recently in Changing Nature of Content Category
"The user is more important than the advertiser, more important than the developer, more important than anyone else. At the end of the day, it's the user who's going to drive the advertising dollars."
Registration for the subscription only online analysis and research service, Cable U, opens today for those who want to know everything that pertains to 24 hour US cable networks: "the constants of nearly every deal, including: budgets, co-productions, distribution, international sales, legal, pitching, press & publicity and pricing."
Servicing networks hungry for content with the explosion of world wide cable as well as less vertically integrated organizations or professional looking for centralized information, this site is another example of what I have referred to elsewhere on The Second Sight as efficiency measures arising organically alongside the creative economy, manifested to solve the endemic vagueness around creative financials. (See Hedgefunds for Hollywood).
The first original series to move from a mobile platform to linear broadcast is coming to Comedy Central. Launched as five minute shorts on Amp'd Mobile, Lil' Bush: Resident of the United States is an animated satire that puts President Bush and a few colleagues including Lil' Cheney and Lil' Condi back in the schoolyard in elementary school. Comedy Central has ordered six episodes.
I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.
I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.
First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?
Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:
"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"
Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).
What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?
I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.
Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”
How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).
In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.
Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."
Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!
Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.
None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.
O.K. Lets assume, as the always insightful Jeff Jarvis has written, that "everybody is a network." "The conversation is king" et cetera. A corollary would be that distribution is cheaper and the barriers to entry are lower with digital tech; so leverage shifts to the content producer (or more specifically copyright holder) and away from distribution...but, what about advertising cost? In a global market, increased competition has lowered the cost of production but creative costs (from design, to marketing, to advertising) have increased significantly. Greater competition means a greater need to differentiate oneself from the glut… If everyone is a network, will these content producers really reap the benefit of their copyright vis-a-vis the traditional network model? Is the advertising model that works in this scenario dependent on viral marketing? How about sustained creativity for anyone individual in the mass of Internet content producers? High quality content takes time and time is money for those not independently wealthy? Doesn’t one need economies of scale to spread risk to maintain creative output et cetera? Won’t media firms (MTV FLUX, YouTube, and MySpace in this case) ultimately reap the benefits of copyright….? Who makes money?
WSJ.com - Digital Replicas May Change Face of Films
Excerpts and Highlights:
Steve Perlman became famous in Silicon Valley for pushing the boundaries of technology and entertainment. Now he is trying to change the face -- literally -- of characters in movies and videogames.
Thanks to Cinematech I came across this audio file from a March panel presented by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco entitled: "The Digital Revolution".
The panel included "Richard Chuang [PDI/DreamWorks], Jeff Fino, [Wild Brain], John Knoll, visual effects [ILM], and Stu Maschwitz, [The Orphanage].
Ultimately, television can have a relationship with the internet that features cannot. “Features have been able to grab on to what internet can do for marketing and publicity,” says Megan Wolpert, executive vice president of Spyglass Television, when I interviewed her in January this year: “However, TV can do what movies can’t with that relationship, because they don’t need to add a step. They don’t need to say come see us. They just show it. You can show a memoir, a travelogue, a serialized anything on the internet. I think even if you just look at the act of watching a movie versus watching television, it’s more analogous to the act of watching a computer.”
Certainly, the popularity of Reality TV is the outcome of the game generation trend towards interactivity. What is happening more recently, however, is an extension of the relationship between television and internet with show like Lost and VH1 Webjunk. Now MTV introduces MTV Flux a combination social networking portal/television channel.
Excerpts:
CanMag- Box Office- Monster House 3D Box Office Exceeds
"3D in digital is much better than 3D in film. The technology in digital doesn't create the headaches that you have in 35 mm, because your mind doesn't have to adjust for imperfections in the speed of the film between the two projectors," said Joe Berchtold, president of Technicolor Electronic Distribution Services, when I interviewed him in February this year. A heightened entertainment experience, which includes, 3D, may be the only way that theaters can compete in the new age of digital multideliverables, video games, home theaters, and waning theatrical admissions.
The results of Chicken Little and now Monster House confirm this likelihood.
Read Excerpts:
Here is a summary of upcoming pieces in my four part series on digital technology and emergent media trends for 2006:
The second installment will focus on the changing nature of our industry’s below-the-line labor market vis-à-vis digital acquisition and post, and how newer technologies are transforming our industry’s culture and training cycle. I will illustrate how our industry is moving from a culture of apprenticeship to a culture of technicians, and how this development fits into the larger context of globalization and the creative economy.
The third piece will focus on growing demand for greater clarity and efficiency in the way that Hollywood and other creative industries do business. I see the viability of digital technology as part of an emerging trend in Hollywood towards solving the endemic vagueness around creative financials that are symptomatic of our outmoded ideas about creativity.
The fourth piece will focus on emerging markets and the changing nature of content that is resulting from these newer technologies and other generational and economic trends.
Cheers,
Alexa D. O'Brien
Since its inception as catalyst for cinema’s transformation from black and white to color, Technicolor’s history now spans ninety years in the motion picture industry. Even as parent, Thomson, leverages the rainbow’s magic brand to advance its digital cinema venture, Technicolor still processes over five billion feet of motion picture film a year. DreamWorks, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Twentieth Century Fox have all signed agreements to use digital projection systems from Technicolor Digital Cinema on five thousand screens in the United States and Canada; and under the terms of a strategic understanding with Century Theatres, Technicolor will begin to install digital projection equipment with a beta-test deployment of ninety to hundred-and-twenty screens, in the first quarter of 2006. With an initial rollout plan for complete digital projection systems on up to five thousand DCI-compliant screens over the next three to four years, Thomson intends to deploy at least fifteen-thousand digitally-equipped screens in the United States and Canada over the next ten years.
As president of Technicolor Electronic Distribution Services, Joe Berchtold is responsible for the strategic development, growth, and operations of the Thomson Services division worldwide, including all aspects of Technicolor’s digital cinema initiatives, on-demand content, and IPTV distribution services. Since joining Thomson in 2003, Berchtold has been co-head of strategy and acquisitions, leading key initiatives that include the acquisition of DirecTV’s set-top box business; the company’s investment in Content Guard with Time Warner and Microsoft, where he now sits on the board of directors; and the forging of an agreement with VeriSign to jointly develop an online content authentication and authorization service bureau to support secure delivery of electronic entertainment content over digital networks.
Alexa O’Brien
Do you think digital cinema will reverse the declining box office trend?
Joe Berchtold
Well, I think that the hope of that is what has driven a lot of the energy behind digital cinema over the past year. I think people have come to realize that the savings from digital cinema on the cost side are some ways out, and the real opportunity here is the top line. It's getting customers back. If you think about a movie theater as a retail business, it’s among the most constrained retail businesses you can imagine from a merchandising standpoint; because as a physical reel of film is tied to a physical room, there’s just no flexibility. Digital inherently creates a lot more flexibility. People are talking about some of the things. You can add more screens. You can move screens. All of which will help on the margin. But, we also think, and I’m not creative enough, but we also think that five years from now, what are some of the most creative people in the world going to have figured out to be able to take advantage of this technology?
