misc Are short films the least respected form of art?

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Nate started a thread about how the most succesful short film creator in the world earns about 80k a year (not including taxes, private health insurance costs, no 401k matching) and that his fame level is so low we've never heard of him

Don't want to hijack that one but it got me thinking that perhaps short films are the least respected form of art?
Most people groan at the thought of watching a short film, it's like asking someone to come to your piano recital or something.

A regular painter, in this day an age, can make millions of dollars.
Even with an NFT if you're not selling physical art, a banksy nft sold for $340k

It would take that short film dude 4 years to earn that, and if you're more realistic about it and factor in costs of living for 4 years, it doesn't add up - he would actually have to make short films for like 7 or 8 years and live extremely frugally to save that kind of money that one NFT of a painting sold for.

People really respect painters and they go to museums to see their paintings.
Singers have shows on TV and people gather round to listen to them and think of it as something fun that puts them in a good mood.
Literature writers get rich and famous (e.g. jk rowling)
Feature film makers get rich and famous
Architects get rich and famous
Broadway gets rich and famous (e.g. Hamilton)
IDK much about scultpure but there was a rabbit from 1986 worth 91 million, there's probably a contemporary scultpure making $ somewhere
Standup comedians get paid 10 million by netflix for a single performance
Even a FIVE MINUTE set for a comedian can be a guest on the tonight show or something and produce good money and fame
When was the last time the tonight show had a guest spot for a five minute short film? How many people would flip the channel!!

It seems like every single form of art except for short film produces fame and fortune.
Short films are part of the oscars and you could argue there's some fame there but nobody i know watches them IRL and i make short films, even i don't seek out the oscar nominated short films each year to watch them all. i can't name a single director that won a short film oscar in the past 5 years

Seems like the rule is.. short films are not something people really care for.
And then there are the few odd exceptions here or there that break the rule
 
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A regular painter, in this day an age, can make millions of dollars.

Can? Maybe. Does? Not really.
My mom was an excellent artist and studied with some top-level painters. Yes, she sold some paintings. No, she didn't make a lot of money and could never have lived on her earnings.
I have a cousin who is a somewhat successful artist (he sells and exhibits in well-respected galleries) but he's certainly not rich.
 
Can? Maybe. Does? Not really.
My mom was an excellent artist and studied with some top-level painters. Yes, she sold some paintings. No, she didn't make a lot of money and could never have lived on her earnings.
I have a cousin who is a somewhat successful artist (he sells and exhibits in well-respected galleries) but he's certainly not rich.

Yeah there aren't many painters that make it to banksy level fame
And even in history most of them seemed to get famous after they died so yeah painters must be pretty low on the totem pole too

I'd hope their art at least pays for itself and it's supplies, i'm down over 10k and made zero dollars so far doing shorts
Now granted I suck and I'm a nobody, but at least a nobody artist can sell a painting for a few hundred and get money for their supplies
 
Some short films produce fame and fortune in the same way a five
minute standup comedy act produces fame and fortune. A short film
can get into a festival, be seen by the right people and the film maker
produces a film (or films) that produces good money and fame.

I can say the same thing about writers. Most short stories get no respect.
Some do and go on to great success with novels. Same with short films.

I get your point – your examples are not good ones. Most painters,
singers, writers, architects, theater producers do not achieve any level of
fame or fortune. I'd say people only go to museums to see paintings by
painters they have heard of. And they gain a “name” after a small gallery
showing that gets buzz. Most standup's never get that five minute Tonight
Show gig.

In general people don't like short films. But are short films less respected
than short stories? By unknowns? Are short films by an unknown director
less respected than a gallery showing of an unknown painter?

But I get your point - more people go to comedy clubs to see unknown
standup’s in a month than people see short films in a year – so I do agree
with you that short films are far less respected than stand up comedy.

Looking at the list of Live Action Short Film winners is eye opening. I had
to go back to 2015 before I recognized a director. In all of the 2000's there
are only two. But I've always said that winning a short film Oscar doesn't
help a career. I'll bet most short film makers don't ever see any of the nominees.

Most makers of short film don't watch short films (by people unknown
to them) on YouTube or even attended film festivals. If the makers of short
films don't want to watch short films the general public sure doesn't.

I worked on the short-lived reality show “On the Lot” which featured
people making a short film every week. No one watched.

So I do agree with you overall. Just not with the examples. Short film alone
do not get much respect. But most forms of art don't.
 
Some short films produce fame and fortune in the same way a five
minute standup comedy act produces fame and fortune. A short film
can get into a festival, be seen by the right people and the film maker
produces a film (or films) that produces good money and fame.

I can say the same thing about writers. Most short stories get no respect.
Some do and go on to great success with novels. Same with short films.

I get your point – your examples are not good ones. Most painters,
singers, writers, architects, theater producers do not achieve any level of
fame or fortune. I'd say people only go to museums to see paintings by
painters they have heard of. And they gain a “name” after a small gallery
showing that gets buzz. Most standup's never get that five minute Tonight
Show gig.

In general people don't like short films. But are short films less respected
than short stories? By unknowns? Are short films by an unknown director
less respected than a gallery showing of an unknown painter?

But I get your point - more people go to comedy clubs to see unknown
standup’s in a month than people see short films in a year – so I do agree
with you that short films are far less respected than stand up comedy.

Looking at the list of Live Action Short Film winners is eye opening. I had
to go back to 2015 before I recognized a director. In all of the 2000's there
are only two. But I've always said that winning a short film Oscar doesn't
help a career. I'll bet most short film makers don't ever see any of the nominees.

Most makers of short film don't watch short films (by people unknown
to them) on YouTube or even attended film festivals. If the makers of short
films don't want to watch short films the general public sure doesn't.

I worked on the short-lived reality show “On the Lot” which featured
people making a short film every week. No one watched.

So I do agree with you overall. Just not with the examples. Short film alone
do not get much respect. But most forms of art don't.
You make a great point about short stories.
Even a full length book, if it's a collection of short stories, gets far less respect than a novel
 
Short serials can do well/have done well. The Little Rascals, Bugs bunny, Popeye, Beavis and Butthead. Live action? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

It's reported all the time that people's attention spans are shorter now than in past decades yet short films have not really been embraces AND feature films are actually longer than they use to be. Now it common for features to be well over 2 hours.
 
Personally, I feel like "short film" has become a bit of a dirty word today. It means "I borrowed my mom's camera and had my friends act in this." Regardless of if that's the actual case, that's how the audience perceives it. That's the downside to the democratization of filmmaking. Anyone can do it, so why should anyone give them the time (views)? Even Youtube channels that built their audience on shorts like Freddie and Corridor, the shorts were never original in the beginning. They were fan films about video games for the most part.
There are always exceptions to this, David Sandberg comes to mind. He and his wife made a bunch of short horror films and got picked up by Hollywood. But overall, I think people hear "short film" and run the other way for the most part.

"Feature filmmakers get rich and famous"
Some do. Most of us don't. We make a feature with the hopes that it'll blow up, but know deep down it probably won't. It will find an audience though, no matter how small, and that makes the process worth it.

I should add, I still make shorts, but they're usually a testing ground for me, trying out new ideas or techniques. I do post them, hoping maybe I'm the one in a million, but mostly I make shorts to help myself learn and grow.
 
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Nate started a thread about how the most succesful short film creator in the world earns about 80k a year (not including taxes, private health insurance costs, no 401k matching) and that his fame level is so low we've never heard of him

Don't want to hijack that one but it got me thinking that perhaps short films are the least respected form of art?
Most people groan at the thought of watching a short film, it's like asking someone to come to your piano recital or something.

A regular painter, in this day an age, can make millions of dollars.
Even with an NFT if you're not selling physical art, a banksy nft sold for $340k

It would take that short film dude 4 years to earn that, and if you're more realistic about it and factor in costs of living for 4 years, it doesn't add up - he would actually have to make short films for like 7 or 8 years and live extremely frugally to save that kind of money that one NFT of a painting sold for.

People really respect painters and they go to museums to see their paintings.
Singers have shows on TV and people gather round to listen to them and think of it as something fun that puts them in a good mood.
Literature writers get rich and famous (e.g. jk rowling)
Feature film makers get rich and famous
Architects get rich and famous
Broadway gets rich and famous (e.g. Hamilton)
IDK much about scultpure but there was a rabbit from 1986 worth 91 million, there's probably a contemporary scultpure making $ somewhere
Standup comedians get paid 10 million by netflix for a single performance
Even a FIVE MINUTE set for a comedian can be a guest on the tonight show or something and produce good money and fame
When was the last time the tonight show had a guest spot for a five minute short film? How many people would flip the channel!!

It seems like every single form of art except for short film produces fame and fortune.
Short films are part of the oscars and you could argue there's some fame there but nobody i know watches them IRL and i make short films, even i don't seek out the oscar nominated short films each year to watch them all. i can't name a single director that won a short film oscar in the past 5 years

Seems like the rule is.. short films are not something people really care for.
And then there are the few odd exceptions here or there that break the rule
You didn't so much hijack my last thread as preempt my next one, lol.

After so many years of thinking about this stuff, I have what I'd call a medium grasp of what's going on. It would honestly take an actual book to spell out what I see, but on topic here, people don't get paid for being artists. It's a statement that's 1% false, but we'd commonly say things that were 45% false as bold and confident truths. (talking about humans in general).

If I had to boil it down as short as possible, like a tagline for the eschaton, "People get paid for having money"

It's not so cut and dry as all that, but if you really took a wide look at what's happened, that crazy sentence is more broadly true than any political bullet point you've ever screamed at a social media post in your life.

How much is a Nate North Painting worth? It's worth nothing. In fact it's worth less than nothing, since I invest time making it, uploading it, tagging it, and then have to do further work to get 0c. I won't post images here, you guys know my work, and while it's nothing special, it's more than competitive with some works that have sold for more than my lifetime income.

But how much is a Grimes painting worth?

It's worth 6 million dollars, required her to write "this on sale now, enter the void" and took 20 minutes.

She did less work, at lower quality, than I typically do in a night. I'm not bragging, Grimes is just a very average visual artist, dime a dozen really.

So why does she get paid my lifetime income for a single night of midrange work?

It's because people aren't buying the paintings, they are buying a visible association with a popular person. In the digital age, reach is determined by money, and a person cannot become popular without advertising, which in over 99% of cases comes from money. Once Grimes married Elon Musk, she was in a social circle of billionaires. That association is what is being purchased. The image of having the brilliant social refinement to like the "right" people.

I have a friend out in Vegas, who is wealthy, and he knows the Art Basel organizers, and began telling me stories about their galleries. People had gotten excited about one of the innumerable factions, I won't say which because it isn't relevant, but they found a person from that group, had them spray paint a rock yellow, and he was paid 40k for it. Another time, a different ideological faction was in vouge, and one of them was selected to be paid 85k for the exhibit "dust no. 1" which was some dust they had swept up, encased in a glass box. I don't want to take the trouble to get the actual photo off of my phone, but it looks like this, but with dust at the bottom. They are not paying for the art they want, it's a pretext to be seen handing money to the right people, as a method of social climbing. I think they often fool themselves, staring enraptured at a million dollar black dot on a white canvas, and explaining to another socialite how they think the dot represents apartheid. Idiots.


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Essentially, when an extremely wealthy person's IQ drops below 60, they enter the "World of High Fashion" which is code for rich people handing each other astronomical sums of money for creative work such as "I think blue is trending this year, let's make something that no one has ever imagined before, a blue dress" And they revel in it, the nonsensical bullshit nature of their idiot world. Often creating clothing so incredibly bad that you can literally find better designs by penniless high school students that will be forced into minimum wage slavery.

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See that, that's the artwork of a millionaire kid that works 20 hours a year high on coke. They took a jet to a limo to this show to a party while Steve Cutts was uploading videos to youtube in the hopes of his share of fractional pennies. I'm glad they did add up for him, but imagine the math. Imagine how many thousands of times as much effort a genius had to put in to succeed as this idiot from the right side of the ever increasing wealth divide did.

I met this girl from Europe that was designing clothes. Average stuff, but competent, even good, stuff that looks like this, in the pro design programs, not a sketch, I mean she made the actual production templates factories could use. Her family had no car. She had an uncle with a car from the late 80s, and he would come once a week to help them get groceries.

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If you ask me, her type of design is drastically better and more useful, and she may never in her life get paid as much as the bar tab for the party celebrating the accomplishments of the designer above who put a model in a pool floatie.

I could literally give one example after another all day long, in every sphere of commerce. Unethical people quickly rise to the top, because everyone appreciates the profits a little bit of lax ethical thinking provides (I'm looking at you wells fargo, you subhuman psychopaths). That pools wealth with people who are self centered and sociopathic. Since art is a luxury, it's mostly people that have pooled wealth that can afford to buy it.

So TLDR selection of which artists get paid is made based on social posturing, rather than art quality.

Are short films the lowest paid form of art by effort? I would say that's likely the case. There was a day when it was appreciated, put simply, when it was rare. Tex Avery did ok, but then I can't seem to find a person from that era who didn't end up owning a vacation estate from working at the post office.

Another factor has nothing to do with art or anything we did. The economy (when measured correctly) is a tire fire. We have more money than ever before in the history of the world, and at the same moment most people are making an insanely low fraction of what they used to for the same effort. My friend's dad drove a truck back and forth down a single road, delivering loads of coal. He was a high school drop out with no skills. He put 3 kids through college, paid off a mortgage, had a happy marriage, and died of old age with no financial problems. College graduates working full time now will never afford a home. A gen Z that can run a particle accelerator will be living in a rented apartment owned by a toll booth worker from the boomer generation, or whoever inherited their wealth. We broke America with unchecked greed.

Direktorik is right of course, short films are a path sometimes, really the only path for one of us, to getting to make a feature that might be profitable some day. Even that concept is severely overblown in perception though. Mostly wishful thinking. I watched an episode of Star Trek last night, it was directed by Nimoy's son. I watched an episode of the Mandalorian last week, it was directed by Ron Howard's daughter. I watched a bad movie that made more than I'll ever make in my life, it starred Francis Ford Coppola's nephew. Anybody seeing a pattern here? Maybe 300 high profile directing jobs available per year, and a son or daughter born into extreme wealth every 20 minutes.

Did you really believe that they earned it? That years of work mattered to the only people that could allow any of us through the gate? Here's a person who worked so long and hard that they eventually got on national television. Recognize her? She's what 6 years old, building facial recognition with the American public when you were still trying to get your dad to buy you a toy for Christmas. Her family had 160 million dollars at the time, that's before she started earning 20 million dollars a year for showing up to a difficult job 3 months a year. I feel certain that there were other kids in her class that could have learned to act, but of course none of the kids from poor family ever got even a single opportunity. If they did, they got paid pennies on the dollar compared to when she did the same work. I don't hate Scarlett Johannsen, she seems nice, and she didn't cause any of this. But I do hate a system that unfairly oppresses anyone who didn't win some family tree lottery. We should be better than that as a society, and bluntly, we aren't.


It's on a steady curve, getting worse and worse, and they say AI will be the final nail in the coffin, shifting all remaining wealth to those that already posses it, regardless of why. So Pablo Escobar's family will own Norman Borlaug's family from the next generation forward, in all but name. Thanks free market!

The video below does a great job of walking you through the death spiral that's made all of us poor. Short film, long film, music video, does it even really matter, or are we just people without rich friends, and that's the end of the story for us?


Anyway, I hadn't posted an unhinged rant about anything in a while, and felt the time was right.
 
Short serials can do well/have done well. The Little Rascals, Bugs bunny, Popeye, Beavis and Butthead. Live action? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

It's reported all the time that people's attention spans are shorter now than in past decades yet short films have not really been embraces AND feature films are actually longer than they use to be. Now it common for features to be well over 2 hours.
Ok but this fits my pattern, you are listing short films made long ago, when people respected work, and short films were more than 1000x as rare.

This short attention span thing is kind of a false dichotomy in my opinion, but that's a whole different post. You are off to a good start though Everyone is watching 14 second videos, but somehow movies are now 110 minutes. There's a lot to that discussion, but bottom line, full length cinema isn't going anywhere. Social media posts are not a replacement for Goodfellas, but those investors seem drawn to shallow thinkers like a magnet. Sorry Sean, stole your example.

 
Wow... That was some speech, Nate. I pretty much agree with you, and that's the sad part. You weren't ranting as much as you were simply telling it like it is.

I don't really think there is any hope left. I've resigned myself to that apparent fact. For me, the idea of Indie film making use to mean the possibility of some amount of financial reward. A small piece of the pie. Just a sliver was all I thought might be out there. Now, I'm pretty sure if you're going to make a movie, a feature film, you'd better just do it for the love of it. Show it to your friends. Put it on Youtube. Four wall a theater for a night, Hand out copies on Blu-ray to those who still own a blue-ray player. That's it.
 
Wow... That was some speech, Nate. I pretty much agree with you, and that's the sad part. You weren't ranting as much as you were simply telling it like it is.

I don't really think there is any hope left. I've resigned myself to that apparent fact. For me, the idea of Indie film making use to mean the possibility of some amount of financial reward. A small piece of the pie. Just a sliver was all I thought might be out there. Now, I'm pretty sure if you're going to make a movie, a feature film, you'd better just do it for the love of it. Show it to your friends. Put it on Youtube. Four wall a theater for a night, Hand out copies on Blu-ray to those who still own a blue-ray player. That's it.
I'd call that 99% correct, with some notable exceptions. I've said it for years now, and got bored of saying it, but it's been a while so I'll say it again for the 16 loyal fans. I do a lot of case studies. Groups of people working together towards common goals can have reasonable success in a small creative business. Pay the rent, get your work out there, etc. That's what I'm trying to do. It's possible, it just takes at least 5 or six driven people operating in harmony with shared advantages. I don't see many case studies of lone individuals making it in film. I would say it's literally one in a million, maybe worse. You literally have a better chance of being struck by lightning, if your crew doesn't have a minimum 5 people and an investor.

This is the first example that I posted, at the very top of the first big Save Point post.


It's too long to watch but what happened here is this. A group of hardworking and talented people met on the internet, and then one of them pitched an idea that was good, and they all went to work on it, built up a product bible, pitched it, and were given the resources to work for a few years. It was a hit, they made it to the front page of their sales platform (steam, it's big, if you don't know it, really big) and shared their creative dream with the world, leaving with an improved reputation, some fame, and significant cash. That story happens IRL about 20 times a year. A pure solo creator does it in the same market about once every 3 years. I would point out that they did a list of things none of us has done. There is more than one side to the difficulties we all share.

So just pointing out, not to you, but to literally everyone, that this (filmmaking) is a sport designed for teams, and we're all weaker for not trying to find ways to pool production power.
 
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I look at the idea of making a GOOD indie film kind of like solving the Rubik's Cube. Before you can make that film, you must solve the puzzle, except the puzzle is more like a riddle. The riddle is this: How do I make a good indie film with the resources available to me? It almost sounds simple but it isn't. I've been trying to solve this one for many years. I can't afford professionals and I loath the idea of using amateurs who can't do their job as well as I believe I can. Believe me, I'm not great an anything but I'm good at a lot of things, so I will do a lot of things. It all goes back to the riddle though. How do I make a good indie film with me doing a lot of things? There's only one of me!

Here's what I've come up with.

CGI characters performing on live action plates. Of course the story has to work with such a concept. I will have to use voice actors that I will pay to perform the voices. As for the CGI characters; modeling, painting, rigging and all of that, I can do it. One of the many disciplines I've taught myself. As the the actual character animation, this is what I plan to do:

Motion capture:

This clip is from a company that makes mocap suits. There are only 2 or 3 around that offer this kind of a solution. Mocap that is accurate enough to not need any serious clean up. A turnkey solution that can literally drive your CGI character in real time. It comes with a bit of a price tag but it is warranted considering the quality you get. Who will perform in the suit? Me.
 
Nate seems to have similar ideas - my problem with this approach is that the characters lack star quality.
It's POSSIBLE to get it, you can see it in movies like LOTR with gollum. fantastic face action transferred to the character.

That's the real gatekeeper. Star power. Gollum was definitely a star.
 
I think using the deepfake layer on top of the cgi characters will go a long way. I'm not going to use famous people, but I can put together whatever realistic human face I want in photoshop or krita and then have it humanize the characters.

I think star power is a gatekeeper, but far from the only one. The really insurmountable one is marketing. If you don't have some investment, and some marketing, the product is basically irrelevant. It's just because your on a playing field where so many competitors do have those bases covered. I've seen movies with no star make it, like basically the entire Japanese theatrical market is 80% animation. I just don't see situations where one person takes their savings and extracts a win. I just did a film with 50 or so people a few years ago, and they put in 150k of their own money, and I told them beforehand that they would loose it all, and then they lost it all. The issue was that there was no marketing person. I told them to spend half their budget on marketing, and they said that they were just going to post it on facebook and wait for the world to beat a path to their door, so they could make a better movie. Without digital marketing of at least some volume, outcomes become very predictable. I think they got 4 grand back, they were very confident beforehand that the sheer quality of their film would break the ice, but since you had to have already heard of the film and gone to their facebook page before you could even see a trailer, which was their only ad, it was a dismal failure.

The moral of the story is, when fishing, don't just throw the net on the deck of your own boat.
 
I think using the deepfake layer on top of the cgi characters will go a long way. I'm not going to use famous people, but I can put together whatever realistic human face I want in photoshop or krita and then have it humanize the characters.

I think star power is a gatekeeper, but far from the only one. The really insurmountable one is marketing. If you don't have some investment, and some marketing, the product is basically irrelevant. It's just because your on a playing field where so many competitors do have those bases covered. I've seen movies with no star make it, like basically the entire Japanese theatrical market is 80% animation. I just don't see situations where one person takes their savings and extracts a win. I just did a film with 50 or so people a few years ago, and they put in 150k of their own money, and I told them beforehand that they would loose it all, and then they lost it all. The issue was that there was no marketing person. I told them to spend half their budget on marketing, and they said that they were just going to post it on facebook and wait for the world to beat a path to their door, so they could make a better movie. Without digital marketing of at least some volume, outcomes become very predictable. I think they got 4 grand back, they were very confident beforehand that the sheer quality of their film would break the ice, but since you had to have already heard of the film and gone to their facebook page before you could even see a trailer, which was their only ad, it was a dismal failure.

The moral of the story is, when fishing, don't just throw the net on the deck of your own boat.
You can have a star that isn't a famous face. movie stars have a quality that made them famous, it's a quality that was there before the fame
gollum is a great example. or pretty much any horror movie the monster is the star. a deepfake layer on top sounds awesome.
 
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I think using the deepfake layer on top of the cgi characters will go a long way.
How about using deepfake to replace special character make-up? The idea is to scan your actor's head, bring it into a modeling program such as Zbrush then do your character make-up on it. Create blendshapes and whatever else you think you need then rig the head for animation. Record the head to meet the requirements of deepface then use that footage to train the deepfake program so that it can "apply" the digital alterations to the footage of the actor in the scenes of your movie. In a sense, like Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button except instead of tracking the CGI head over the actor's head, the deepfake is doing the work.
 
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