Placing the means of production in the hands of the
proletariat
Holiday, with its miniscule production budget, is not a
product the studios are concerned about, as a singular case. Audiences know the difference between a
$4,500 movie and a $4.5 million dollar movie.
Of course, Holiday was not
created to compete with studio products in theatrical release. This project was born in the digital world
and was picked up for distribution in the direct-to-digital market. Cyberspace is where it belongs. That used to be a bad thing since digital
used to be the dumping ground for failed films.
But that was before most people under 25 consumed their entertainment on
mobile devices, not television or movie theaters. There is no longer a need to create content
in IMAX if it is never seen on anything bigger than a home theater system.
Don’t get me wrong, the IMAX film format is amazing. Great image
size, beautiful cameras and lenses. Rich. Powerful. On the other hand, my iPhone shoots images
that look great, even projected in a theater.
And a phone has two advantages over IMAX to be exploited: low-cost and
fast. This is what keeps movie studio
executives up at night.
Expense
Until very recently, filmmaking was an expensive process, especially if
you wanted to project the image in a theater.
Only a few wealthy companies, primarily the Hollywood studios, could afford
to front the huge production costs, thus few people knew how to make them, and
even fewer had significant experience in the process. As such, a very exclusive club of high-priced
specialists using specialized equipment developed.
Video was never competitive in the theatrical release world due to its
low resolution. But by 2010, 1080HD was
what phones were recording—a format with enough quality to allow large
projection. Today many phones shoot
4k. Anyone with a laptop and video
editing software can create a feature. The
studios know this. The IMAX “experience” is what they sell now. But of course technology will improve and
production costs will drop even further.
Soon the studios’ massive investment in production infrastructure is
going to look very costly on their balance sheets. These corporations
have seen the impact of digital technology before.
Most of the movie studios are attached to a music company, somewhere up
or down the corporate chain. In the 90's the studios watched those
companies begin to go under, one after another, as audio software and hardware
improved to the point where anyone could build their own home recording
studio. To most people, these recordings
sounded no different than the best Capitol Records studio. Today, due to a massive drop in the cost of
production and post-production, the movie industry revolution is already in
play.
Speed
Ninety minutes is a long time to hold an audience’s attention with projected
images. It takes a story, thousands of
hours of work, and a massive amount of images.
The final cut of Holiday is a
sequence of roughly 1,400 shots, selected from about 6000 takes with either an
iPhone4s or a GoPro 3. With the
lightweight tech I was able to do an enormous number of shots—an average of 100
per four-hour day, roughly one shot every 2.5 minutes.
Principle photography for Holiday
amounted to 60 “days” of shooting between February and December, 2013. However, all but two of those days were only
half-day shoots because there was no budget to feed people and the free sunlight
was best from 2pm to 6pm. Using a standard 60-hour, six-day production
week, production worked out to about a four-week shoot. So, while it is true that we shot for almost
an entire year, down at the granular, day-to-day level, we were moving quickly.
This project would have taken a decade if it had been shot on IMAX.
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