Web Serial Killers
As an addendum to my post just below this one on new distribution solutions for indie filmmakers, specifically giving attention to the possibilities the Internet provides, I found this related worthwhile New York Times piece (courtesy of the Filmmaker Mag blog), titled "Serial Killers," referring of course to online serials.I've been toying with the idea of producing a web serial myself, and I still very much plan on sounding off in my own way, within that specific medium, so watch this space. However, this NY Times article is somewhat dampening.
Here's a snippet:
"Time will tell, but right now Web serials — no matter how revealing, provocative or moving — seem to be a misstep in the evolution of online video. Introduced with fanfare again and again only to miss big viewerships, shows like “Satacracy 88” and “Cataclysmo” have emerged as the slow, conservative, overpriced cousins to the wildly Web-friendly “viral videos” that also arrived around 2005, when bandwidth-happy Web users began to circulate scrap video and comedy clips as if they were chain letters or strep. Top virals — “I Got a Crush . . . on Obama,” “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” “Chocolate Rain” — never plod. They come off like brush fires, outbursts, accidents, flashes of sudden unmistakable truth. By contrast, Web serials smack of planning and budgets and all that vestigial Hollywood stuff."
AND...
"The French artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau once decried the high barriers to making movies, suggesting that the cost of cameras, film, editing machines and other equipment had inhibited filmmakers by making them too nervous about bottom lines. “Film will only become art,” he proposed, “when its materials are as inexpensive as paper and pencil.” When Cocteau died in 1963, he must have been confident that his hypothesis would never be tested. But with 13 hours of video uploaded every minute on YouTube, the Cocteau test is now fully under way. So where’s the true art? I’m not sure. I know I continue to prefer the strange, beautiful, comical and mysterious stuff of YouTube — the unclassifiable stuff — to the laudable efforts at nouveau serials by bona fide directors. But I still believe that, one day, another serial — not called a serial, maybe, and certainly not webisodes — will exploit the eccentricity of the virals and manage to make new and serious jokes about the truth-illusion-truth-illusion of cinéma vérité, which is what “lonelygirl15” once did. With that, the thrill of filmed “reality” will be returned to viewers, as it was in the early days of film, radio and television."
I will not be deterred damnit!! :o)
Read it all here: SERIAL KILLERS
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