Hacker Cinema
Paranormal Activity
2009 · Film · 86 min
Directed by Oren Peli
After a young, middle-class couple moves into what seems like a typical suburban house, they become increasingly disturbed by a presence that may or may not be demonic, but is certainly the most active in the middle of the night.
4 positive2 negative20 neutralfrom 26 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
I don't think you're wrong, and I got the same feeling while watching the 'found footage' style of horror movie ; Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, etc.
It feels like weak writing to fall back into a narrative first-person account for the entirety, but I can't place my finger on why.
Maybe it just seems like it's the easiest 'fiction' to write because it is so predicated on the fantasy being narrated by a perspective that is entrenched in a normal reality?
Some of the best content I've encountered is exactly this. A good example is "High Maintenance", which started as a Vimeo web series and cost $1000 / episode to produce. [1] Another example is Christopher Nolan's first film, "Following", which cost $6,000 to produce. "El Mariachi" by Robert Rodriguez famously had a $7,000 budget.
They could also pool their money, crowdfund, or otherwise shoot for a bigger budget, in which case they could mimic the first Coen Brothers movie, "Blood Simple", which had a $1.5 million budget. There's also "The Blair Witch Project" ($200k), "Clerks" ($230k), "Paranormal Activity" ($15k), etc. [3]
I truly hope this latest labor dispute causes an industry shift in the direction of creatives taking more control over production and distribution of their content. Musician Anton Newcombe said this about the recording industry, and I think it applies equally well to film studios:
"...it’s a mafia. And until they can write the letter that I’m writing, they are the postman, and I am the letter writer. Period. End of discussion."
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Maintenance
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Following
3. https://collider.com/movies-with-smallest-budgets/
Games market is rough but I'd take it any day of the week over the YouTube black hole.You're not finding your beloved indie film even if you type the name in verbatim.
Besides, even if you did make the next paranormal activity somehow and it got a billion views on YT, you're maybe seeing a few hundred thousand in revenue at most (I'm being very generous there). The way to make real money in movies is still controlled by getting a theater chain to give you the time of day.
I think for most of the general public, a movie shot on your phone represents a significantly smaller burden than programming.
The oft-quoted figure is that the production cost of the original Paranormal Activity was $15,000, and that was made before the advent of smartphones.
Filmmaker here - Parasites budget was in the 10 million range. Paranormal Activity's initial budget was in the 15K range (tiny, even when it was shot 15 years ago), a further 200k was spent on post production and reshoots when it was picked up by a major studio. This doesn't count the many millions both had spent on marketing - which is often up to twice a productions shooting and post budget.
High end filmmaking has gotten 'cheaper', in that you can use virtual production to simulate environments etc. And undoubtedly shooting 'digital' is cheaper than film development. Although nowhere near as much cheaper than you might think, once the cost of a DIT and professional colour grade is thrown into the mix. However the standards of both independent film and TV production are enormously higher than they were 15 years ago.
It's not that it's impossible to make something cheaply - I'm involved in the kino kabaret movement, where amateurs and professionals alike join together to make effectively zero budget films over a weekend.
However - the cost of producing a decent film has not dropped to a few thousand. Quite the opposite. Given the high production value of contemporary indies, it's inarguably more difficult now to make something that will play festivals and sell to distributers for an 'ultralow' budget.
Moreover, lots of the budgets you see quotes are as low as they were because the film was effectively subsidised by a small production company. In other words, everyone worked for free and used borrowed gear, often worth hundreds of thousands. For reference a fully kitted out Arri Alexa 35 or LF is over 90k euro to buy, and over 1k per day to rent.
A decent budget for a short film is in the 40 - 50k range, once everyone is actually getting paid for their time. Couple of million dollars / euros would be a low budget film, with favours pulled in and everyone working for less than half of their rates for commercial work.
> Democratized? It’s more centralized than ever.
What 'centralized' in a world that now has 'creator economy' as a thing.
> Also, giving more projects $5m is not a victory if the cost of a proper production is $20m.
Is there any objective definition of that 'proper'. Rhetorical question, obviously, for there isnt.
> it seems like you’re under the impression that a good film can be made with $100k.
It doesn't seem like it. It is like that. Many movies like Paranormal Activity, Parasite were made with low budgets.
> Give that, it doesn’t surprise me that you’re one of the ones who are looking at what’s being served as tv shows and actually enjoying it.
Yeah, people are actually enjoying TV. That shouldnt be a big surprise.
> If you ask me, “the golden age of TV” is a meme based on a handful of shows
How is that any different from the golden ages of cinema in which unending series of rehashed crap were produced to profit off of audiences that had no alternative but to pay for them.
...
Its much better for things to be distributed, democratized and in the hands of more people than small cliques of profiteering feudal lords monopolizing them and deciding what happens. Especially regarding content.
Since 2014, all of Blumhouse's movies are owned, distributed, and co-produced by Universal Studios. Well, except for their BH Tilt division, which is partnered with Neon for co-production and distribution. Their most notable low-budget film that kickstarted their rise was Paranormal Activity, which was straight up acquired by Paramount Pictures for an actual theatrical release.
Blumhouse wouldn't be where they are without the juggernaut's purposefully propping them up.
I mean maybe, “that last paranormal activity movie was absolute torture.”
I assume (charitably) they mean it in a hyperbolic sense
I'd be happy to! Lots of strategic, logistical, and legal stuff. The obvious thing is that I can't release a movie if it's gonna get banned. So you may need to make tweaks or campaign for a different rating / classification. It helps to be proactive and get ahead of these things. Cultures are different and you need to account for that.
Then there's marketing. You need only look at examples like Blair Witch, or "Blumhouse Films" (eg. Paranormal Activity, The Purge), to see what marketing and word of mouth can do for a movie. Of course you'd like to see a bit of that magic (this explains why so many movies are marketed as "reality" / found footage), but in any case, you want to optimize the hype and buzz around a movie. This is a whole skillset, that may differ by culture, and can make or break a film. We're talking about millions of dollars here.
Now none of those things interest me personally. I don't "like them". I definitely don't like restrictions by region. However saying: "they have it in their country, why don't I have it yet?" is a bit like saying "they've made a final cut of the film, why can't I watch it yet?". They have this incredibly expensive asset that they're trying to maximize revenue on.
This is what Blumhouse productions do. They are responsible for Paranormal activity and a number of other cheap successful films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumhouse_Productions
This is a great example of the fallacy that if you like games and can program a game, you can be a game developer and get any traction. Programming isn't really the hard part, and it gets easier every day. It is true if you can do something technically bleeding edge you will be sought after by game companies and other companies as well.
Imagine: I have liked movies my whole life. I read that Paranormal Activity was made by a guy with a video camera and very little money. So I thought I would get a camera and become a film maker. Surprisingly, it didn't work.
As a child, I always had an irrational fear of channels on the TV with no signal - you'd get a blast of white noise accompanied with a grainy white noise image feed. Due to the internal amp configurations of the TV, the noise would always be much louder than normal channels, so it was always a shock when you landed on a dodgy channel. Then you would start to see faces and hear voices.
The film Paranormal Activity didn't sit so well with me...
It might help if "disrupt the film industry" would be defined. Seriously, what does that even mean? Disrupt it so "the little guy" can make movies? You can put together a feature-length movie with an iPhone, a good microphone, and free editing software. Actors might help, too. Want some snazzy vfx? You can do your own. Want your product to be seen all over the world? Thanks to the magical internet, you can have it up for sale on numerous sites. So what do we mean by "disruption"? Oh, you want people to actually see your masterpiece? That doesn't require disruption; what you're talking about is old-fashioned marketing. You need a "Paranormal Activity"-style marketing campaign (a movie, BTW, which cost $10K to make).
Chances are, though, your movie is crap (as 95% of anything is) so nobody is going to want to see it anyway.
In the 1990s, when I was working on animation software, I was told something like that by a major Hollywood director. He'd directed some of the early films that had both animation and live acting. The costs were high. What he really wanted was to get the overhead down, so he could make first-rate films for about $20M.
At the time, "Reboot", the first all 3D cartoon, was being cranked out at one episode per week by 30 people. He was hoping the technology would let him produce feature films with a similar sized staff. The idea was to pull in set models from a "digital back lot", green-screen in the actors, and go.
The technology didn't deliver that. Instead of a cast of thousands of actors, we now need thousands of animators. Look at the credits for any action movie today. There's just too much custom modeling, artwork, move matching, and manual editing of the edges of clipping paths. (The last two are outsourced grunt work and likely to be automated soon.) Viewers wanted photorealism, and that requires as much detail work as set-building.
People have tried to do CG action features on the cheap. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" was supposed to be one. But that cost $70 million, and only made $54 million. (The semi-noir look didn't help. Done better, it might have been a franchise like Captain America.) Iron Sky (budget $10M, box office $8.1M) almost a decade later had much better effects; the CG isn't as obvious.
Other than low-budget horror features, most notably "Paranormal Activity", there haven't been many successful low-budget action movies in recent years.
I have great respect for Garry Tan. However, I find the key quote on "how profitable Hollywood can be at best" a bit strange, and want to correct his statement below based on specific data. Here's the quote "...11X return on capital. That's the highest grossing film ever made, and a good proxy for how profitable Hollywood can be at best." Since 3,800X return on capital for Peter Thiel's FB investment is an obvious outlier/best case scenario, let's compare apples to apples and take the best case for Hollywood-type investments: "Paranormal Activity With just $15,000, the visionaries behind this project created a movie that took in a worldwide gross of almost $197 million." That sounds like 13133X return to me, which is even greater than 3800X... See http://www.businesspundit.com/10-most-profitable-low-budget-movies-of-all-time/
It Follows, along with a handful of others (The Strangers, the Ring, the first Paranormal Activity), was the first well done horror movie I've seen since the BWP. I guess it comes down to what scares you personally. For me, it is much more about the atmosphere that the movie creates, that often borders on weird and uncomfortable, and human. Of course, the Shining is also a great example of this. The slow slip into insanity in a grand, isolated hotel in a blizzard does way more to evoke that weird feeling that lingers after the movie ends.
It confuses that so many directors keep pushing the same style of horror movie out, when they consistently get poor reviews. Are all directors scared by the same exact themes?
Yes, it's a lot of work, which is one reason, even on a short you'll see a long list of credits (specialization definitely improves the product). You can make a film for nearly nothing and occasionally someone will have the idea and talent to put together a film on a shoestring budget that cuts through (Pi, Primer, This Is Martin Bonner, Paranormal Activity, etc). And shoestring budget has different definitions for different people, everything from couple hundred bucks to low millions. The Duplass Brothers made a short for nearly nothing, whatever camera they had and an answering machine that launched their career (following it up with the micro-budget feature The Puffy Chair). Robert Rodriquez shot El Mariachi for $7500 (couple hundred thousand was poured into after it was bought to make it ready for theatrical release). It's easier now with so many great digital cameras and editing software. But first and foremost, filmmaking is a collaborative art. If you're trying to do it all by yourself, you're doing it wrong (unless it works, then you're doing it right) and people cost money, especially talented well trained people.
I think there is a place for high frame-rate: stories that are aiming for fly-on-the-wall realism (I'm thinking particularly of The Wire, or Paranormal Activity). I could also see new film-making styles built around the tech. Unfortunately, epic fantasy is exactly the wrong type of film for the HFR effect.
In addition to looking lifeless and flat, everything seemed to move too quickly, and human movement looked cartoonishly fluid (curiously, CGI creatures looked more real, and people looked like CGI creatures). I found the scenes that looked best were the ones in slow-motion, and I can't help but feel the whole movie would have been improved through using effects to slow down everything.
That quora post is virtually worthless. Comparing "production costs" between films is effectively meaningless.
For example, Paranormal Activity had a "production cost" of only "$15,000", and did "$190 million" at the box office. Sounds great, right?
Wrong. First, every low budget production involves calling in a huge number of favors (read: free work) that is not done on normal, funded films. So even the $15K number is ridiculously low if you are trying to compare the issue at stake: money spent on production value.
But let's ignore that. Next up is the cost of prints. A print on a wide release averages about $1200/print. Suppose we order 3000 prints on the Paranormal release. How much did we just spend? $3.6 million. (Without doing a wide release, there's no way to hit $190 million at the box office.)
Wait, that doesn't sound right! The Quora post makes it sound like some heroic filmmaker got their film made for $15K and it "made" $190 million! And now you're telling me they couldn't have even sold tickets without spending another $3.6 million? Yup. The $15K bit is a lie, part of the publicity of the film.
Of course, they don't keep the whole $190 million. Roughly, they'll end up with around 50% of that after the theaters take their cut. So we're really talking $95 million on a $15K production budget, and a $3.6 million print budget.
But wait, there's more: making the correct payments to the production staff, actors, director, etc. and the cost of marketing.
You see, a film that's shot under budget will have to make up those numbers if it does well. There is no free lunch. For our purposes, the amount is likely to increase a $15K budget by 10-100x (not a typo). In many cases, substantially more as top-line talent takes a percentage of that $95 million gross.
And then we hit the advertising. In a nutshell, Hollywood (and in this case, Paramount did the marketing) has a tough time marketing anything in the usual way for under $20 million. So let's go with that, even though I suspect the numbers for Paranormal were higher.
So...with all that, was Paranourmal a hit? Absolutely. Was it an example of a $15K movie that made $190 million. No, not even close: you're a few orders of magnitude off.
The same is true of every other film on that list.
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The real reason Hollywood does not make "low budget" films like the OP seems to want is because even spending zero, nothing, nada on the production budget still incurs $20-30 million in costs to distribute that film.
So ask yourself: if you were going to spend $20-30 million manufacturing and promoting something, wouldn't you want to spend some serious money on the production itself? Wouldn't you want to make sure the story/actors/direction had a high likelihood that people would watch the resulting film?
You would, which brings us to the real problem: actual films cost more.
Suppose you were really frugal, you tailored your story to easy locations, few setups, just a couple of actors, etc. Even then, $200K is pretty low to do a film that would actually be watchable (the "found footage" genere is basically the only kind of film that can be reasonably shot for the under $50K budgets in the Quora article).
So okay, $200K – and you don't have distribution yet, and likely won't get it.
That's a lot of money to "invest" in a film that won't make even it's production costs back. The vast majority of independent filmmakers don't have that kind of money to blow on a film and get zero return. (Raising money there is just as hard as Silicon Valley, if not harder.)
It can be done. Like Crazy is a recent example, made with a $250K production budget and shot on HDSLRs. It's done well enough that the production team will get to have another go on a presumably bigger film.
But it won't be done often, and bitching about the 120 films the Hollywood studios make each year (yes, it really is that low) isn't going to change what they make.
Wow. Simply, wow.
I was literally 90% done with my Kill Hollywood RFS application when I saw Paul's tweet about this article and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Can anyone tell me that the Kill Hollywood is about making the world better and not simply about revenge?
I just finished ranting like a lunatic on twitter (sorry Paul), but I'm going to try and be nice here. Keep in mind that you are attacking my very livelihood. I've been working in the film industry for my entire adult life. I recently quit my job at Paramount, a key member of the "most unscrupulous of all the industrial conglomerates" and rampant exploiter of "artists they pretend to represent."
I'd like to offer my perspective as a humble filmmaker. Are there any other filmmakers here... any? I highly doubt it, the amount of ignorance I see tossed around on the subject of Kill Hollywood is simply staggering. When will I see ANY balanced perspective? One real solution? One real alternative? I can promise you that it won't happen unless Silicon Valley is willing to at least talk to a damn filmmaker about these issues. Here's my email: odnamra@gmail.com. Hell, here's my cellphone: 323-963-4433. You want to kill Hollywood, call me anytime.
First, everything the RIAA and MPAA has down is WRONG. As a filmmaker whose future is on the line, I can tell you that it affects me more that it affects you. It's my livelihood, but only your inconvenience.
Now, on to the article. The author makes two technical points: sharing is easy, and storage is abundant. My response is… well, duh!
Here's a hint, killing Hollywood is NOT an engineering problem. All of the engineering problems have been solved, the technology already exists! We can instantly share a movie to all devices anywhere. We can store every type of media ever created. Thanks. It isn't helping.
The author also offers one pseudo solution about marketplaces. I hate to tell you this, but distribution is already a marketplace! Sure it might be inefficient, sure it is mostly dominated by a few key (evil) players, but it DOES exist. Paranormal Activity was made by one solitary man. It then went through a series of marketplaces and eventually pulled in $200 million dollars. I know the guy who made the film, we met when I helped make Paranormal Activity 2 and 3 (he's a former videogame developer fyi), and I can tell you that his "blood, sweat, energy and tears" paid off pretty damn well, thank you very much! Question: Can this marketplace be improved? Answer: Yes, but… here's a snapshot of what this mythical marketplace would have to replace:
Total industry size $90 billion. New movies enter the market through theaters, generate $30 billion, then proceed through windows rental>cable>VOD>DVD/Blu-ray>streaming>etc. The order can sometimes be different, what's important is that there are relative amounts of money made at each stage. A distributor might pull in $7 per ticket PER PERSON at a theater (how many friends do you take to the movies with you?), $5 per DVD/Blu-ray, and only 50 cents on streaming. [source: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-forecast-online-demand-for-movies-tv-shows-will-surpass-dvds-this-year/] Can your solution replace three friends going to a movie theater and generating $21 for the distributor with three friends watching Netflix and generating 50 cents? Also consider the fact that you may see a movie in theaters, then buy it on dvd, then buy a blu-ray, and THEN watch it on Netflix over the span of several years. Also, marketing is a huge problem, the cost of marketing that movie worldwide is amortized across the entire lifecycle, and is heavily front-loaded. If you skip straight to digital streaming, for example, you skip out on huge amounts of advertising. Don't believe me? Name five indie movies that came out this year. Now name five Hollywood movies. Lastly, and this is important, what Jacques fails to realize is that the cost of making new movies REQUIRES all of these windows to exist. I personally don't want to live in a world where the only movies I can watch are kickstarted documentaries. You tell me we can crowdfund a $500 million dollar Avatar without using the hedge fund approach of a major studio, and I will change my mind.
P.S. income from ALL DIGITAL is currently ~$3 billion of the $90 billion pie, why would Hollywood be in a hurry to abandon scarcity?
Ignoring everything I've said, what happens when you get your wish? I can promise you that if cut out theaters so you can stream Ironman 4 (the documentary) to your retina display iPad while sipping lattes on Powell St., the whole system will come crashing down.
Clearly the MPAA and the RIAA are assholes that need to be destroyed, but consider what you destroy along with it. Some of the greatest living storytellers on this planet are filmmakers. Tell me what you are offering James Cameron, creator of the 1st and 2nd highest grossing films of all time (almost $5 billion dollars worth of customer validation) in exchange for the theater, his medium of choice?
I believe there are solutions, LOTS of them, but we need to work together to create them.
/rant complete
Narrative visual storytelling as an entertainment form won't be killed any more than books will be killed.
If you're trying to kill movies and the idea of a shared emotional experience I don't think it'll be done.
If you want to kill Hollywood as overly powerful force on our planet then TAKE THEIR TALENT.
Enable artists to make money more easily without Hollywood. Save musicians and freedom of speech at the same time. That seems to be the true essence of this thread. Not killing movies per se, right?
Check it out: I'm a low budget movie shooter. I've been living this industry for about 8 years. Like a starving artist. I get hired by a string of dreamers that almost always lose money. The movie doesn't always lose money. The artist does. Usually the producer does too. The funds to make the movie have always come from another business or job.
"Hollywood" is a marketing, publicity and distribution juggernaut: An independent investor that produces a $100K movie can not invest $15 million in marketing and distribute that movie traditionally. If they could they would. They literally have to go through a Hollywood Studio.
Find a major release - other than Passion of the Christ - that wasn't a studio release. I don't think it exists. Plenty of movies get made independently. The tiny few of those that make it to theaters go through a studio. The studios are part of a vertically integrated marketing, news, publicity and distribution system and that is "Hollywood".
Conglomerates own the Studios, TV Stations, cable channels, newspapers (they wine and dine critics and reporters on top of that), talk shows and radio stations. Hell, they own the billboard companies. And a chunk of the Internet. But the Internet scares them. It's not piracy that scares them. It's the news / marketing / publicity monopoly they currently own that they fear losing.
The Theater Scam: Hollywood studios prebook all the movie slots available at all the theater chains. Theater chains give deference to the studios when booking movies all year long to ensure they get "The Hobbit" when it comes out. If the Theater chains knocks a Hollywood offering out in favor of an Independent movie then maybe they won't get the Hobbit until 1 or 2 weeks after the open. It's a barely legal, "nod and wink" oligopoly that replaced a previously completely illegal monopoly.
The clear evidence of this truth is that the most powerful people in Hollywood can't break out of that system. If Tom Cruise could make a $2 million dollar movie and market it for $20 million to make $200 million using his name and fame to skip the studio system he would. Tom does own his own production company. But he can't build a distribution company. 95% of the media is owned by a handful of companies. And they control the theaters too.
The Internet is the ONE thing the conglomerates don't own. Barely.
A chink in their armor - THE DEAL: Replace the licensing system used to sell movie rights worldwide with an online marketplace. The studios don't own that. Connect the rights buyer and artist directly. In turn, all ARTISTS are joined together in a devastatingly powerful way. David Lynch and Lars Von Trier would be at the head of the pack. Everyone else would follow. A truly independent union of entrepreneur artists. Even independent of a union.
Here's how it currently works: Right now, little distribution companies that are actually movie sales reps (not owned by Hollywood) get in the middle of every low budget non-Hollywood movie transaction. They do Hollywood style accounting against the filmmaker so the filmmaker never sees a penny of the money Germany pays for the film. Worse still, you've now lost your rights to YOUR movie in that region. If money is actually made it takes 18 months to get to the filmmaker. That puts a ton of people out of the business. *EDIT - Important point here. This is where all the best talent is funneled into the Hollywood system. You can't make a living as an artist unless you join them. That's a crucial part of my rationale. You don't change Hollywood. You create an alternative to Hollywood that works better for the TALENT. That's how you bring Hollywood down. Steal the next generation of talent from them.
A friend of mine works for one of these companies actually DOING the deals so I'm positive I know what I'm talking about here. He's a filmmaker too. He can't even get a good distribution deal out of the company he works for. That's how bad it is. Every indie filmmaker hits this killer brick wall and they are all frustrated.
The Money: Paying my bills: If I could sell broadcast and DVD rights directly to German broadcasters without going through a SLEW of middlemen I'd make good money. They pay decent money for decent content. Even stuff without movie stars garners OK cash. You probably can bring in $100K to $300K for a tiny movie if you do it well and maximize the value of your rights. If you win Cannes and Sundance with a commercial piece then you'll sell to a studio (sad, but true). They'll give you the most money for a commercial product that is ready to go. But that's a handful of movie per year.
FALLACY- "They wouldn't keep making little movies if they didn't make money" Most little movies are funded by wealthy people for tax benefits, glamour, fun, publicity or to meet an actor. Or a bunch of enthusiasts make a labor of love for free. Some little movies do make money, it's just rare.
Public Exhibition rights: Major theaters have to run movies for weeks at a time. Small independent films can't put enough butts in seats to justify that. The theater won't risk their relationship with the studios by running much (if any) content that is not studio content. Technically they "could" legally run independent content. But most theaters require newspaper advertising in support of a movie run. That huge expense kills the deal right there. Who owns the newspaper? The Conglomerate corporations . So they buy advertising from one of their own companies. No real loss. If a little guy wants to "compete" guess what? The big media players STILL take a cut of your profit via Newspaper/TV/Billboard ad revenue.
The Internet to the rescue again: If a local art house cinema (or Coffee Shop, Club, Church or ANYONE) could license a digital showing of my movie and pay me even "SMALL X" dollars and sell tickets then both of us may have a viable business model. They could do a SINGLE SOLD OUT showing and move onto the next indie film. They market my movie to their Facebook Fans or Meetup group. Or I market my movie in your Zipcode via Facebook and send people to your theater and provide a sold out show. None of that can happen with Hollywood content and without digital distribution. Indie theaters could more profitably promote Indie content if it was easy to find, preview and acquire. They could show 1000 different titles a year! Finally a competitive advantage over Hollywood for the small theater.
Amazon, Google, Youtube, iTunes, Spotify and Netflix are all theoretically in position to help indie artists. They would have if they wanted to already.
Currently Spotify and Netflix pay one royalty (high) to major studios & music labels and another royalty (very low) to independent artists. In fact, Hollywood has jacked up the licensing costs to Netflix returning most Netflix profits back into the Studio System. There's no getting around those mofos.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20080205-261/what-was-hollywoods-role-in-netflix-price-hike/
That's the power of Hollywood. They essentially own a monopoly on talent and content because they have longed owned a near monopoly on Marketing & Publicity. You will go through a studio if the money is BIG. Period.
Netflix is fighting back by creating their own show. They'll need to create a lot of shows before they become another HBO but it's a reasonable plan of attack. They really could build what I've described here if they wanted to. Maybe Vimeo could do it too.
THE REAL PAYOFF: Now imagine a central marketplace for movie rights has aggregated all independent content creators. How tough would it be to start a centralized streaming service for Internet viewing? Internet rights & revenues are always owned by the artist and never sold.
THEN all the best content creators in the WORLD would end up creating all the BEST ADVERTISING in the world promoting this new shared "Network". And they probably wouldn't share their content elsewhere. Hollywood would still make blockbusters and larger budget fare. But they'd be locked out of everything else. Hell… even large budget stuff would make it into the system and Hollywood might actually get killed. How long would it take 500 million Internet consumers to switch from Netflix or Youtube? Facebook fast.
Completely change the world in 3 years. But all artists have to unite. They have the REAL power.
It couldn't be a traditional company that exists to maximize profits. The organizing principle is to maximize artist exposure and/or artist revenues. Perhaps it would have to be a cooperative. I don't think any American company would ever have the balls to do this right. Unless a wealthy artist funded it.
So that's the real stuff to wrap your brain around if you want to protect free thought and expression.
Oh... Paranormal Activity was purchased for $100K, the STUDIO made $100 Million+ and now SAG is going after the lowly creators (who got the $100k) for royalties of $4 Million. Yeah, the studios and unions are our protectors and Hollywood is the land of milk and honey if you have talent. LOL.
Indeed. There is an opportunity for those kind of productions as evidenced by some movies already out there (Primer, Blairwitch Project, Paranormal activity), but not all of content is suited for those productions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Schindler's List... actually most aren't well suited).
But, you make an interesting point. Ultra low budget movies, character or story driven ideas could get funded and developed via kickstarter, but you still have most of productions which aren't suitable for low budgets no matter what.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Slickness of the film is important, I.e. editing, sound quality, etc., but thisis but one dimension. When I sit on a Friday evening browsing page after page of crap movies on Netflix, this dimensiona is less important than the actual content and originality. I can't believe that film school students, armed with a decent camera (not a camcorder) and audio equipment cannot produce watcahble and interesting content. Well-known examples do exist, most recently Paranormal Activity.
Your arguments (it's hard, costs millions) were labeled to some other industries, that are now trickling down to DIYers, e.g. 3D print, self publishing. You can now rent a professional studio to record your own CD and some groups have done so.
However all solutions about creation are moot if the created content has no way of reaching the buyers. I still think this is the main problem. Putting your movie on YouTube is not a viable solution.
You're wrong.
>>Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone.
Hollywood's not everyone. There are thriving filmmaking communities in just about every large city on earth. They don't all have the same mass appeal as Hollywood vehicles, just as small town startups rarely have the same appeal as Silicon Valley companies, but they're there, and they're vibrant. Furthermore, the very definition of avant-garde cinema is, to some degree, "let's do this just do this just to do it".
>>There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there.
It's called independent film, and the number of participants has skyrocketed in the last decade. Sure, they fantasize about it becoming a major hit like Paranormal Activity, just as every startup founder and his iguana fantasizes about being Google. But that doesn't mean they aren't making movies just cos they like making them.
You cannot make a professional movie in your garage basement using a Mac.
I wonder if a movie shot in 7 days that has made $192 million and had a wide international release counts as "professional": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal_Activity_(film)
Paranormal activity an Pi are dirty cheap, but nonetheless good movies. I mean expensive is not necessarily good.