It's really interesting to me that the net is being used as a distribution system for short films. The ones that you hear about tend to be fan films, because they're already associated with a big brand -- like the re-edits of Star Wars: Phantom Menace, or that Batman/Joker test reel thing.
But there are also plenty of independent shorts on www.atomfilms.com. They look good, you know.
I was thinking, too, about the ways we watch movies over the weekend. The mechanics of it -- there's a whole network of relationships built around physically duplicating a movie off the original print, then getting those physical reels of films from the duplicating lab to theaters across the country. Lots of directors despair over the fact that many theaters, especially in smaller towns, tend to use dim bulbs in their projectors. They don't burn out as often, but they also don't show movies the way they were meant to be seen, really.
So... a couple years ago, there was some talk (and someone did this, can't recall who but it might have been the Matrix or George Lucas -- yeah, Lucas) about setting up movies instead so that theaters would be receiving stations. The studio would beam a theater-quality image directly onto the screen. Used digital streaming, scrambled satellite channels all that stuff. The end result wouldn't be that different, but the stuff you don't see -- the stuff that puts pictures in front of the butts on the seats -- would be radically different.
I think it'd be foolish for movie companies not to look at what's happening in the music industry and wonder what might be on the way for them... because the main difference between a movie and hit song is really just filesize...... |
