271–280 of 697 posts
Sometime over the past year I went from thinking YouTube content was insignificant compared to Hollywood, to the point where I'd happily give up all broadcast/cable/DVD/Netflix content for YouTube type user generated content. I suspect this will be more widespread in a year or two more.
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I love FFC. I'm a current UCLA film student - Coppola's alma mater. One thing to think about: UCLA has always been the "indy, intellectual" film school. It's our rep, internally and (to an extent) externally. When Coppola left UCLA to work in Hollywood, he was branded a sell-out by his fellow students. One thing to think about w/ this whole "crush Hollywood" thing is this: most of your favorite movies (assuming you'v…
There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) So what have they done lately? I think you're proving the point. They're an empty shell of their former greatness and should be put out of their misery to make room for whatever great thing is to come next.
Also, since Taxi Driver by Martin Scorcese was mentioned, take a look at his latest film Hugo. I think you'll agree it's every bit as good as his earlier work.
Here's my suggestion: Trailer Pitch This is a simple design for a site and business where filmakers can crowdsource investment. It uses a simple mechanism to sell tickets and shares in advance based on the popularity of premade movie trailers. It uses a mechanism based on ideas tried by Pinboard, Kickstarter, YouTube, Vimeo, Betfair and Louis CK. One: filmakers make compelling trailers for films they would like to be…
"Shareholders get access to the film-making process and limited creative input during the development ." Dear God no.
What we needed is a YCombinator for artists. Invest in each artist like he/she was a startup, then take losses on the flops, win big on the successes. Everything is in place for significant disruption: the artists are upset about low royalties and the consumers are upset about draconian copyright enforcement -- should be easy to offer more favorable terms to both parties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love FFC. I'm a current UCLA film student - Coppola's alma mater. One thing to think about: UCLA has always been the "indy, intellectual" film school. It's our rep, internally and (to an extent) externally. When Coppola left UCLA to work in Hollywood, he was branded a sell-out by his fellow students. One thing to think about w/ this whole "crush Hollywood" thing is this: most of your favorite movies (assuming you'v…
I believe the problem isn't the existence of Hollywood, but that too much power is centralized in the hands of too few. Competition within the city can be likened to a Duopoly; competition in name, but far from it in practice. I remember reading about how the RIAA companies engineer their licensing contracts in a way that forces maximum payoffs [1], and I wouldn't be surprised to find those problems in Hollywood as w…
Consider an alternative market: books. Today anyone anywhere can write and sell a book to just about anyone thanks to the Kindle and other electronic book platforms. Borders went belly up and Barnes and Noble might follow. It suddenly appears that publishers serve little purpose. In this scenario publishers are Hollywood.
Movie production has become cheap. Cameras, equipment, software, the costs are going down not up. Hollywood can do nothing about this. There will always be some sort of extremistan $100m+ movies, but that amount of money is not a requirement for a good movie.
Distribution, in high definition, is unlimited with Amazon, Youtube, Netflix, Apple and others. Watching a movie at home on a 65" LCD with a good surround system is often a better experience than going to a theater and watching a poorly focused image from a projector with an underpowered bulb.
The only thing really left is for the talent to look and say, Hollywood has nothing to offer me, with Hollywood I am worse off not better.
This is all inevitable -- but, if you want to speed it up, these players need to make sure the glitz and glamor are on their side. Without it, Hollywood is going to be around for a while.
I hope whatever kills hollywood also kills distribution by regions. In the third world we are people too.
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There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville) So what have they done lately? I think you're proving the point. They're an empty shell of their former greatness and should be put out of their misery to make room for whatever great thing is to come next.
"So what have they done lately?" Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years: Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
Pixar demonstrates that it's possible to make 10 movies without 5 of them being terrible. If the rest of Hollywood knew what it was doing you would expect the same quality from Sony pictures etc.
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This is true, but you have to understand that there is a phenomenal amount of talent locked up in Hollywood. I'm not necessarily talking about directors or actors, but camera men, DPs, best boys, set dressers...the list goes on and on. These people have skills that require many, many years of on-site training. (Don't forget about producers, line producers, production managers, site scouts, and all of the logistics pe…
Question: Mega-productions like avatar rely mostly on special effects than storytelling. Are people still impressed by special effects and stunts? Aren't video games becoming more impressive to look at than movies? As a result, are these technical skills becoming less important?
admittedly, this sort of thing (immersing you in a virtual world) is indeed something video games have already proven themselves rather good at (unlike storytelling imo)
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Did you guys consider video games? I think that's already a viable alternative form of entertainment. I would argue video games already killed Hollywood, they just never pulled the sword out. $50 for 100+ hours of content vs $10 for roughly 2 hours? No contest.
I think video games is one of the reasons Hollywood is dying in the first place. What other thing in the last 30 years has really been a direct competition to Hollywood. The Internet is definitively on the list too.
Sometime over the past year I went from thinking YouTube content was insignificant compared to Hollywood, to the point where I'd happily give up all broadcast/cable/DVD/Netflix content for YouTube type user generated content. I suspect this will be more widespread in a year or two more.
What's really needed is the next level of authoring tools. Here's the startup I'd do: (1) buy up a near dead MMO, preferably one with impressively realistic character graphics. (2) retool it as a machima authoring tool (3) hook it into kinect for motion capture (4) leverage the userbase to crowdsource additions to the 3D library. With just this talented hobbyists and unfunded indy talents would begin to swamp Hollywo…
On the graphics end, it might be better to modify an FPS engine, like the DOOM3 engine. You will get better graphics, and if you are simply generating a TV show, you don't really need the scalability that an MMO provides. And the graphics for most failing MMOS are not that great. You could distribute the machima via a youtube like service that is specific for machima.
You might even get a completely new form of media, because it is not necessary to distribute a machima as a straight up video.
Viewing it could be like 'ghost' mode in an FPS, viewer gets to pick the angle from which the drama is watched.
If you read 'Count Zero', one of the ideas there is that going online into a 3D chat didn't really catch on until there were realistic human faces. I think this is a really insightful concept. It will be important to spend a lot of time on getting faces just right, so that humans react to them in the same way that they react to actors.
Looking at a human face is a really big part of TV viewing for a lot of people. We are conditioned to be attracted to them.