Video Production Evolution

It seems like video is everywhere these days. As the Internet evolves, bandwidth speeds increase, more and more companies, organizations, bands, and individuals opt to integrate video into their web presence. For someone like me, where my day job is freelance video production (while I passionately chase my long terms goals as a filmmaker), this is good news. So I was little surprised when a friend sent me a link to an article titled: "Video Postproduction is 'Dying Industry.'" My friend, also a video production professional, wondered what I made of this article. Here's a link to the article, if you're curious: www.governmentvideo.com/article/104614

Here's essentially my reaction ...

Behind "Cold October": The Making of a HDV Special Effects Short Film

I had already directed a fairly successful short film in the psychological thriller genre titled “Cellar Door,” (click here to read about making “Cellar Door”) so it may come as no surprise that I might want work in that genre again. However, I am prone to trying new things, especially as I develop as a new filmmaker. So, yes, I chose to work on another psychological thriller. Only this one would be quite different from “Cellar Door.”

Independent Filmmaking and the Bad Economy

“Fifteen years ago, the Sundance Film Festival got 500 submissions. This year, they received 5,000. Virtually all of these are privately financed. There’s only one problem: most of the films are flat-out awful (trust me, I have had to sit through tons of them over the years). Let me put it another way: the digital revolution is here, and boy does it suck.”

- Mark Gill, executive of Warner Independent and Miramax, speaking at the Los Angeles Film Festival financing conference.

In case you haven’t noticed, the American Economy isn’t so hot. Well, actually, the global economy hasn’t exactly been amazing. It’s freighting enough to have to stop and consider what this means for most of us middle class Americans. Unless you are the guy in the huge, gas-guzzling SUV thumping some indistinguishable bass-line for the current pop radio hit that pulls up next me on the street while I’m on my bicycle (yes, my good old mountain bike) on my way to the bank to cash my all-too-small paycheck from my last freelance video editing gig, you too probably have lost some sleep over the economic slump.

Once

Once in a while, a film comes along that holds a power over me I can’t quite describe. Such films tend to deeply influence me as a filmmaker. I think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Todd Field’s In the Bed Room, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (that’s the original, not the Soderbergh remake, which I admittedly haven’t had the heart to watch yet). These are films that unexpectedly floored me. Some grew on me slowly, and I kept coming back to them and re-watching them because scenes kept getting stuck in my head and playing there in the background of my mind. That was the case with The Thin Red Line, one of the few remakes that is simply astounding, and completely overshadows the original. In other cases, I walked into something I knew nothing of, as is the case with In the Bedroom and Solaris. These films, and many others not mentioned here, reached inside and touched aspects of my personality, my spirituality, that have affected me ever since.