30 Oct 09 Are Filmmaking and Film School Going Down The Drain?
Today, there are a lot of home-made movies that have been circulating the internet; this makes us question, “is filmmaking – and proper training film school – still feasible?” Does film have a future?
To answer that inquiry correctly, we have to appropriately define our terms. Film essentially does not have a future. More often than not, movies are shot and projected digitally. There are holdouts in the film business. Steven Spielberg, for instance, doesn’t want his films to be projected digitally, so he shoots on film. But even he had to give in with his last project, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. The distribution giant, Paramount Pictures, released it both on film and digitally. The movie icon Michael Bay expresses himself in these words: “I’m old school because I like to shoot on film.” He points out that he wants his movies to play in theaters, that “Transformers” was not downloadable for an iPod. These two film giants, Bay and Spielberg are still part of the group of filmmakers who want to tell their stories professionally on the big screen.
But does that kind of cinema have an audience any more? The type of filmmaking with characters and a plot and set-ups that have to be edited together? The fact that today’s largest hits are home-movie clips of “The Worst Ice Cream Ever” and “Spider-Tard,” prompts us to ask: are people still going to watch feature films?
In the online article entitled “Media Metamorphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform or Destroy your Favorite Medium,” Cory Doctorow (a believer on the idea that big movies “might simply die”) claims that the future is more likely to be dominated by crummy YouTube videos.
Is Mr. Doctorow right? Will we not see people going to the movies anymore? Will people prefer to watch a fuzzy home movie on a phone? Will the film business now be controlled by a kid with a flip-cam? The facts will point us to the right answers. This weekend, “Where the Wild Things Are” grossed over $30 million. That’s approximately three million people who went to see it in just three days and box office for the weekend is up forty percent from the same time last year. This figure shows that no one video on the internet has gathered this much response from the public – ever! “Paranormal Activity”, a low-budget feature made for more or less twenty-thousand dollars but shot in a fairly traditional manner with a fictional plot and characters, has made over 30 million dollars and is averaging over twenty-five thousand dollars per theater – those are colossal figures.
Annual box office has not decreased since the worldwide web became such a huge part of our lives. The downtick in profits hovers around one-to-two percent each year, which is actually better than the downturn in the economy. People still like to go out and have an experience in a movie theater with other people, lose themselves in something outside of real life.
As Ron Howard shares to the current DGA Quarterly: “You try to tell a story that’s meaningful, and share it with people.” This shared story is what links the people with their fellow moviegoers – and this is what they need. Therefore, while film may be dead, the filmmaking process and film school as well as the movie-going experience is still so strong and bright.
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