Storytelling

For $100 million or so they can deliver an hour

After a 4-week vacation and a hiatus from both work (for the most part) and the blog, we are back in London and back at work, and now back at the blog.

We spent yesterday at The Guardian and today are headed for Prague where we’re converting Radio Free Europe into Video Free Europe.  More on this tomorrow.  

Today, I am thinking more about the explosive demand for low-cost video and where it is going to come from.

While we’ve pretty much resolved the video journalism issue in terms of cutting costs and driving up volume, the vast majority fo video demand for the future is most likely going to be fiction rather than non-fiction.

An article in yesterday’s Guardian dealt with this specifically.  While London (and many other places like NY and LA) spew out young filmmaking graduates at a voracious pace, there are in truth few places for them to go. They may be driven by dreams of creativity and the desire to direct, yet a cursory glance at a studio like Dreamworks shows that the studio produces, at best, no more than a dozen films a year. And in some years far fewer.

The reason for this is fairly simple.  The cost. At an average of $150 million or more per film it is unlikely that much is ever going to get made. The risks are far too high and the need for return to reach break even far too risky.  So it is that movies tend to militate toward the safe:  Matrix 3, 4 or 5; or old TV shows or even video games turned into movies.  It’s boring but its safe.

As we move inexorably toward screenworld, with video available on laptops and hand-helds, the appetite for moving images and great story telling is going to be vast. (How many times can you watch Speed Racer on your blackberry before you are ready to kill yourself?)  But from where is this content going to come? Not from the studios, not with their built-in cost structures.

But take those thousands of graduates of NYU Film School, USC, London and even, yes, the New York Film School and you have at least a certain percentage of them who are talented and driven.  Give them a digital camera and an FCP edit suite and see what happens.

Watch the credit roll at the end of any Hollywood film or made for TV drama and you’ll understand why the budgets are so astronomical.  But in the world of online video, with its predilection for short and punchy, and you’ll see that there’s a natural connection between the two.

The bottom line is risk.

Hollywood studios are fearful of risk. One bad decision (think Waterworld), can sink a studio, or at least destroy several executives. So risk is at the bottom of the pyramid in the world of LA filmmaking.  Think ‘The Flintstones – The Movie’.  But for graduates of film schools willing to sleep on friend’s floors, what is risk anyway? And what is required except for time, effort and cajoling a few friends to play the roles.

What you can’t manufacture (or often buy) is creativity. That is God-given, and if you have it, the new technologies open the door to vast opportunity.  Just do it.

The Office, The BBC’s smash hit (and US copy) was, after all, the product of a BBC training course in which participant Ricky Gervais was given a small video camera and for a directing exercise instructed to shoot and produce a short video.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.