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I mean- basically what we’re talking about is something that has the potential to slowly kill the film industry as we know it. In every article I read I keep waiting for them to tell us “The Solution”- the way to stop the changes- but so far nobody’s proposed a feasible one. As far as I can tell, digital media transfer will become easier and easier, and more and more socially acceptable, until we reach a point where the current means of film distribution (and in turn production) are no longer feasible.

Is this bad? I mean, my first instinct is to resist the changes- after all, the industry I grew up wanting to be in could be dying just as I get into it? Because everyone suddenly thinks stealing stuff is OK? It kinda gets me irked.

Filmmaking used to be reserved for the big studios. Sure, you could make a film with your Super 8mm Kodac camera, but anything above that generally became prohibitively expensive (at a feature film length) because of the cost of film stock and processing fees- not to mention all the equipment needed to edit it. And if you wanted your film to be seen by massive amounts of people you needed an outside resource to distribute it. Now, with the revolution of video, filmmaking is possible for most everyone. It really is like Gutenberg’s printing press, because what was once reserved for the Church (Hollywood), was then accessible to most everyone (growing steadily cheaper as the technologies to make books were improved and became more common). The internet now makes distribution more or less free- a process that previously, on a wide scale, generally cost millions of dollars.

But if Hollywood loses it’s competitive edge of “Massive Amounts of Money”, where does that leave us? A future I haven’t really wanted to consider, I guess, until I really think about it.

Because the question remains- will it be possible, in this new future, to make money- enough money to support the creation of more films and the creators- off of the films? And how? I’m not optimistic enough to believe that donations would really bring in enough to support a whole film- but we’ll see. I think a complete reimagining of the medium is going to take place at some point in the coming decades, one that will be very difficult to anticipate. It could very well result in the end of “the industry”, but overall, in this competitive rich new atmosphere I think the odds are good we’ll be seeing significantly better films, perhaps more targeted to niche audiences.