In the risk of being down voted to hell, this whole thing seems completely misguided to me. I love the product that hollywood produces. I love great movies and great TV. I frankly think "The Wire" is the best example of story telling I know of. I can think of nothing that silicon valley has produced that even comes close. If Zynga disappeared tomorrow, I could care less, and Hollywood and Zynga are both selling entertainment. Zynga's entertainment value is less than worthless to me. I hope hollywood continues to be a massively successful industry in the hope that the next David Simon is created.
Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#32I am sort of surprised that pg chose movies rather than music. Movies are hard . You need a lot of things to make a movie. I liked Avatar. You can't do that kind of thing on the cheap. Actors, sites, makeup, lighting, special effects, etc. For music, you need the band, which are essentially founders from an equity standpoint, and own their own instruments already since they know how to play them. You need like $1000…
games used to cost a lot of money and used to be hard. now they cost nothing to make except your time, and you can do it in your garage. let people have the opportunity to access the distribution channel, and they will figure the other problems out. people in this community seem to think that they're the ones that are going to solve all the problems in an industry to move it forward. colleges have access to expensive…
Large games are still costing an enormous amount of money to make. Think in something like GTA 4, Skyrim, COD Series, WOW. Indie games have their market and can even become massive (Rovio?), but console and pc games in general are at a whole other level. I wish I could make Skyrim in my garage =) !! But that's not going to happen any time soon.
As you said, I think that there are platforms already here to distribute music. What we should start to put our focus on is in how to finance TV series, and eventually Movies (that are much more expensive).
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#33The project has an objective find an alternative to Hollywood. But like everything else, baby steps are in order. I don't know why it is assumed that a beta solution should ship with the ability to produce "Avatar" caliber productions.
When it comes to technology, I'm optimistic that it has almost limitless potential to revolutionize. My instinct tells me though that a startup aimed at competing against Hollywood doesn't have to be about inventing alternate forms of entertainment, but rather to work at optimizing on alternate means of production and distribution of the already successful form of entertainment. Recent efforts with other media have shown that most optimizations are about cutting out as much unnecessary intermediary layers as possible.
I'm convinced that a number of people currently working within the Hollywoodian system are unhappy with the present arrangements and I would not be surprised if a few were to come out the woodwork because of this YC invitation. Their expertise will be essential, because if my guess is correct, I think that a large majority of people on HN are complete ignorami when it comes to making a movie or a tv show. We're more consumers and critics than we are creators or producers of such material.
Another thing would be to look at what currently exist that tries to spearhead such alternate efforts. Is it successful? What are the problems? What has been tried? Where's the data?
First, let's ask the people who currently work on the fringe of Hollywood how they're doing it.
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#34In the risk of being down voted to hell, this whole thing seems completely misguided to me. I love the product that hollywood produces. I love great movies and great TV. I frankly think "The Wire" is the best example of story telling I know of. I can think of nothing that silicon valley has produced that even comes close. If Zynga disappeared tomorrow, I could care less, and Hollywood and Zynga are both selling enter…
I guess you meant "couldn't" care less? :)
http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html
But I'm in total agreement with you. I too like the productions of Hollywood. I just don't like their political power.
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#35What hollywood has going for it, is a track-record of executing on the operations behind producing movies that make money. People who invest in movies invest for the same reasons all of us invest in anything-- to make money. Hollywood is a business, albeit one rooted in entertainment, but let's face it-- many artists are also just in it for the money. I don't think our world view of "entertainment" is going to shift…
Think in a disruptive way. Actors don't have to be paid $10 million. Special effects don't have to cost tens of millions. Equipment doesn't have to cost millions either. Make the movies the way you would build a lean start-up. And bank on innovation in the movies and scripts, rather than recycling popular content and make it very flashy. But as I mentioned in another comment, I think to kill Hollywood you need incuba…
The problem with movies is that even when the argument may seem very interesting at first, the realization can make it a disaster. That's what differentiates an awesome director from a bad one.
That's why I see hard to visualize crowd-financing to movies. The risk may be just too high.
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#36What hollywood has going for it, is a track-record of executing on the operations behind producing movies that make money. People who invest in movies invest for the same reasons all of us invest in anything-- to make money. Hollywood is a business, albeit one rooted in entertainment, but let's face it-- many artists are also just in it for the money. I don't think our world view of "entertainment" is going to shift…
This is a somewhat misleading analysis, as the costs of Hollywood movies are not implicit relative to their production values.
Movies do not have a typical accounting structure and that impacts their budgeted "costs".
In a typical collaborative venture with some degree of risk one might expect for most of the principals (director, actors, etc.) to take most of their compensation in the form of profit sharing. However, this is untenable in Hollywood because the standard is to use a fucked up accounting structure which results in most movies showing no profit on paper. Instead, a small number of people end up taking home a percentage of the gross revenues of the movie and most of the earnings for everyone else are upfront in cash.
This has several negative effects. For one it makes any movie staring a big star very much more expensive because you have to pay them $x million out of pocket. Also, because it raises the budget floor for making a top tier feature film it forces the industry to take fewer perceived risks, because a financial loss would be more devastating.
But this is only Hollywood's poisonous culture, not a fundamental aspect for making films. A production company that was founded on firmer and more ethical financial ground could implement proper profit sharing for actors, directors, other creatives, and even effects houses. It would allow movies to operate on lower budgets and embrace higher risk projects.
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#37I think what we need to work on is improving the political clout of engineers, not destroying hollywood. We've won this one (I hope) but it took rather extreme measures. Blacking out wikipedia isn't something which can be done every time congress threatens to do something stupid. It's a bit like going on strike - a negative act which can turn people against us if overused. We need mechanisms which can influence polit…
The reason this worked out right (still crossing fingers) in my opinion, was because much of the tech community were on the same side in this one. But there are other occasions where this would have been a mess. So, the message would not have been clear. The congress and media would have thought "some people say yes, some people say no... nothing new".
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#38How much money do indy film makers need for a minimum viable product? How can we help them bring it to an audience and make money?
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have tech, cost of tech is going down. But you still need talent to operate the tech, and the best talent are not cheap. The workers have unions and the ones that are not part of union do this full time and want to support at the very least a middle class lifestyle. For a hollywood movie, you don't want to use just any crew. You want the best film crew, the best makeup, wardrobe, casting, post & pre production. Al…
That's all true for now. But eventually you'll be able to throw some actors in front of a green screen and do everything--makeup, wardrobe, special effects in post production, with one guy. Hell, when computers can generate photo real actors, actors will just be people in mocap suits (except that we won't need mocap suits by then), and they won't even need to be attractive. Eventually one person will be able to creat…
Video games are there today -- computers and mocap rigs all the way down. Still they are approaching hollywood movies in terms of budget. Tangled and Avatar are some of the most expensive movies of all time.
There are no shortcuts to that level of polish. Doesn't matter how advanced your rendering is, you still need an army of 3D artists. Makeup isn't going to be much cheaper just because you do it in Maya.
Re: Investment Firm Y Combinator Goes on Offensive Against Hollywood
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have tech, cost of tech is going down. But you still need talent to operate the tech, and the best talent are not cheap. The workers have unions and the ones that are not part of union do this full time and want to support at the very least a middle class lifestyle. For a hollywood movie, you don't want to use just any crew. You want the best film crew, the best makeup, wardrobe, casting, post & pre production. Al…
That's all true for now. But eventually you'll be able to throw some actors in front of a green screen and do everything--makeup, wardrobe, special effects in post production, with one guy. Hell, when computers can generate photo real actors, actors will just be people in mocap suits (except that we won't need mocap suits by then), and they won't even need to be attractive. Eventually one person will be able to creat…
Does voice acting not require talent?