[Note: I do not get any money or renumeration of any kind for the fawning review I give to the makers of The.Scene (I don't even know any of them). I'm just a fan and wanted to share their work with other tech-savvy independent filmmakers.]
If you haven't already heard about it, I suggest you watch the internet-only series called The.Scene. You can find all the episodes here: http://www.welcometothescene.com/ and they are all free (under a Creative Commons license).
The series is about an elite group of hackers who take pirated films, prepare them as digital files and upload them to illegal distribution sites on the net. The goal is not to get rich, it's to get respect from "the scene," the loose collection of people who make big Hollywood blockbusters available online the day they're released in the theaters (or earlier). The "winner" is the first team to post a highly anticipated film.
That, in and of itself, is interesting. But what's really fascinating to me and important from the perspective of independent filmmaking, is that the entire series is told from a single character's perspective (the character sometimes changes from week to week) and the entire story unfolds as a screenshot of the character's computer screen. You see his or her desktop while a small window in the upper right hand corner displays a web-cam-type shot of the featured character. As the character types a message to another crew-member, we see him typing (admittedly not high drama) and watch the story unfold in the text he is writing and the messages he gets back from other crew-members.
Now I know you are not going to believe me, given the set up, but it is the most compelling entertainment I have watched in a while! I could not stop downloading the episodes until I had watched every one available. So far there's been crime, double crossings, lost relationships, mysterious foreign nationals, lying, cheating, stealing and a ton of tech stuff I probably don't even get because I'm not very savvy on DVD encryption. It's like watching an episode of ER - you don't get all the jargon but when someone says "He's bleeding out," you know it's bad.
Now, lest you think I am either making this up or that what I describe could not possibly be compelling or even entertainment, the makers of the.scene have just started a new series called Marcus Hates His Job. And it's sponsored by Sprite. No isht! I was stunned. Here we all are trying to figure out how to come up with $100,000 to shoot a feature on super16 with Lorenzo Lamas in a cameo as "The Rookie" (for which he got half of your budget for a one-day shoot) all so we can have a distribution company offer us $10,000 for all rights. I don't know how much the new series cost to make (I haven't watched it yet but it supposedly had a "real" budget), but I know it couldn't have cost very much to shoot the episodes that got them noticed.
All of which is to say, if you have a story and it's entertaining and it has an audience, it doesn't matter if you do it as a frickin' flipbook. Someone will want to watch it.
Hmmm, a flipbook feature. . . .perhaps I should previz it on a Pixlvision camera?
If you haven't already heard about it, I suggest you watch the internet-only series called The.Scene. You can find all the episodes here: http://www.welcometothescene.com/ and they are all free (under a Creative Commons license).
The series is about an elite group of hackers who take pirated films, prepare them as digital files and upload them to illegal distribution sites on the net. The goal is not to get rich, it's to get respect from "the scene," the loose collection of people who make big Hollywood blockbusters available online the day they're released in the theaters (or earlier). The "winner" is the first team to post a highly anticipated film.
That, in and of itself, is interesting. But what's really fascinating to me and important from the perspective of independent filmmaking, is that the entire series is told from a single character's perspective (the character sometimes changes from week to week) and the entire story unfolds as a screenshot of the character's computer screen. You see his or her desktop while a small window in the upper right hand corner displays a web-cam-type shot of the featured character. As the character types a message to another crew-member, we see him typing (admittedly not high drama) and watch the story unfold in the text he is writing and the messages he gets back from other crew-members.
Now I know you are not going to believe me, given the set up, but it is the most compelling entertainment I have watched in a while! I could not stop downloading the episodes until I had watched every one available. So far there's been crime, double crossings, lost relationships, mysterious foreign nationals, lying, cheating, stealing and a ton of tech stuff I probably don't even get because I'm not very savvy on DVD encryption. It's like watching an episode of ER - you don't get all the jargon but when someone says "He's bleeding out," you know it's bad.
Now, lest you think I am either making this up or that what I describe could not possibly be compelling or even entertainment, the makers of the.scene have just started a new series called Marcus Hates His Job. And it's sponsored by Sprite. No isht! I was stunned. Here we all are trying to figure out how to come up with $100,000 to shoot a feature on super16 with Lorenzo Lamas in a cameo as "The Rookie" (for which he got half of your budget for a one-day shoot) all so we can have a distribution company offer us $10,000 for all rights. I don't know how much the new series cost to make (I haven't watched it yet but it supposedly had a "real" budget), but I know it couldn't have cost very much to shoot the episodes that got them noticed.
All of which is to say, if you have a story and it's entertaining and it has an audience, it doesn't matter if you do it as a frickin' flipbook. Someone will want to watch it.
Hmmm, a flipbook feature. . . .perhaps I should previz it on a Pixlvision camera?
