Examining The Future Of Film School and Filmmaking
49Today, there are a lot of home-made movies that have been circulating the web; this makes us ask, "is filmmaking - and proper training film school - still viable?" Is there still a future left for the film industry?
To be able to answer that question correctly, we need to appropriately define our terms. Film essentially doesn't have a future. Most of the movies are shot and projected digitally. There are holdouts in the film business. Steven Spielberg shoots on film and hasn't wanted his films to be projected digitally. But even he had to succumb in his last project, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". Paramount released it both on film and in digital format. Michael Bay says "I'm old school because I like to shoot on film." He points out that he wants his movies to be seen 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 through the big screen.
But are there still audiences to that type of cinema? This is the kind of filmmaking that necessitates the simultaneous editing of set-ups. The fact that today's largest hits are home-movie clips of "The Worst Ice Cream Ever" and "Spider-Tard," makes us question: are people still going to watch feature films?
Cory Doctorow, a writer who considers that "commercially minded" big budget movies "might simply die", mentions in an online article called "Media Metamorphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform or Destroy Your Favorite Medium" that the future will be dominated by cheap and crummy YouTube videos which, he says, will be seen by you and the "38 other people who are kinked just like you."
Is Mr. Doctorow right on the spot? Is film-going soon to be a fading memory? Will people become more inclined to watching a fuzzy home movie on their smart phones? Is the kid with the flip-cam now the master of the marketplace? The facts will tell us. The film "Where the Wild Things Are" grossed more than $30 million this weekend. This figure shows us that approximately three million people went to see the movie in just three days - additionally, box office from the weekend is 40% up as compared to last year. This figure shows that no one video on the internet has gathered this much response from the public - ever! Even the low-budgeted feature (about $20,000) "Paranormal Activity" has made more than 30 million dollars - on the average, that is about $25,000 per theater.
Fascinatingly, ever since the web has become a primary part of our lives, annual box office hasn't declined. The downtick in profits is about one-to-two percent each year, which is actually better than the downturn in the economy. Truly, this connotes that people still choose to experience the movies in the movie theater with other people and with fancy food - they still want to 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." That kind of shared-story is something that audiences still need. So while film may be dead, the prognosis for the filmmaking process and film school is bright and the future of the movie-going experience seems strong and vital.
