Spielberg and Lucas predicted that technology would allow creative freedom and independent film quality would rival Hollywood productions by now. That was about 30 years ago. I don't think they factored in marketing. As your article intelligently lays out, marketing budgets are what keeps independent filmmakers shackled. There was a time when I hoped a good Facebook campaign or a TikTok meme for an indie could compete with giant marketing budgets. But even that can't compete with the marketing power of IP. Having characters that your target audience dressed up as for Halloween when they were 5 is going to trump a good social media campaign. I hope you are right, and the next technology wave helps push indies, but I worry that those in power will leverage it to keep eyes on existing IP that they have a vested interest in.
Yeah, marketing is a serious challenge because even if production costs are reduced, there's still the issue of getting your film to the rights eyes and to enough of those right eyes. I think it will be possible to solve this problem and I suspect it will have to do with more sophisticated forms of targeted marketing through precision-based recommenders.
Right now you have to spend a lot of money just to get all those eyeballs to see it and then when you have 5 or 10 million people looking at your trailer or movie poster, only a small percentage will actually watch the movie, so you have to increase the number of people who see it by 30+ fold if you want enough people to see it and make a return.
And although this is extremely challenging and likely won't come for a while, I think it's at least in the realm of plausibility for someone to invent a more precise way of getting the attention of the hundreds of thousands or millions of specific people who have a 99.9 percent chance of checking out your movie. So instead of spending millions to get millions to see it, you're spending an affordable amount to get almost all of the the right people who will be the most likely to like or love your movie.
However, that's a double-edged sword because to get to that kind of precision marketing requires more data on people and given that we have zero data rights as of now...Yeah, that's a huge problem lol. So, definitely not saying that this will be an easy road full of candy and children's laughter.
It's gonna be very contentious on many fronts, but whatever happens, everyone, rich and poor, weak or powerful, will have to adapt, so if powerful enough technology can be democratized enough to destroy the leveraging power of big studios dangling money, resources, and connections, then they'll have to figure out a new way to stay on top with all of their money, and it seems the path of least resistance will be to continue leaning on their IP while heavily investing in new projects created by indie filmmakers that are showing huge promise. So ideally, an inverse where you let the global film community create the content and then pump a bunch of money into the projects and people who show the most promise within that massive pool of competition.
Fun stuff to ponder on. Really appreciate you checking it out, Ken, and great comment!
I read something recently about the Supreme Court striking down the antitrust ruling that stopped studios from owning cinemas. Surely this will have a major effect on independent film-making...
Oh man, if you think that's a head spinner wait'll the debates come out about who owns what when AI-assisted media is popularized. They have to use training data, which means they have to use content from previously existing stories, so what happens when you have fragmented parts from other movies woven into your story? Not sure how that will be overcome, but I suppose they could theoretically use blockchain to auto-track IP so that distributed ideas and the original owners can be accounted for. But then again, we have tropes in movies all the time, which sort of copies other movies, but they're different enough so that it's not a legal issue. And since the creator will have to work with the AI instead of just let the AI do it, they can modify ideas so that it becomes their own.
This is true, but if you think about it, it'll be like photography. You'll see a lot of garbage, yes, but you can find websites with millions of stunning photos. So while there will be a lot of garbage, there will also be a lot of great unique content. Furthermore, if we integrate AI into the educational component of learning how to write and make films, then we may see more creators making better content. However, I doubt that could match the number of films that will suck because at the end of the day, it's really hard. But I'll take a mountain of garbage if it means getting significantly better movies than what we see from Hollywood, today.
Lol my apologies. I just didn't want to have to bombard it with "In my opinion" or "I personally think." It's an opinion piece so I figured that was understood.
Okay, so I'll admit I agree with your first half of this piece, in that corporate Hollywood has eroded the artistry in film storytelling. But, you are reaching for the stars in suggesting AI, 5G, and blockchain will somehow fix this? Artificial intelligence is decades away from being able to achieve what you suggest, and I suspect your bias in this argument lies with your personal project. Everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon these days without actually considering the vast and complicated implications of the technology. You fail to explain the significance of 5G. And then we arrive at blockchain, which in your other article, you propose as a solution for independent investors to overcome Hollywood financing and trust issues? Hollywood has a problem with studio monopolisation, risk averse decision making, shady financing, and a complete lack of meritocracy. If you want to rescue Hollywood then the five major studios who take 80% of the box office revenue need to be regulated, as does the quite frankly insane amount of money thrown at supposed talent.
Yeah, that's fair criticism. I'll try to answer as best as I can. So, lets start with AI. First and foremost, calling what we're building right now AI, is a misnomer. It's not actual AI. It's machine learning, which can mimic certain aspects of the human brain, but not the entirety. So In sense, you're right. We're a long long way from actual AI and there's a very good chance that it'll be much longer than decades, if it's even possible in our lifetimes.
But what people are building with regards to machine learning (not actual AI) will be able to do what I described because it's already been accomplished in a rough form and will only get better. Here's a company that's already operational and doing it: https://www.synthesia.io/post/the-future-of-synthetic-media
So, this does mean at some point we will have something like Dalle II only instead of generating images, it will generate frames for a movie. Therefore, you will be able to one day direct your film by texting or talking to a program. No, this does not mean it will make a movie for you, if left to it's own devices. But it does mean that you can communicate to it and it can approximate an output based on your commands. So think of it like having a skilled helper who can do things, but doesn't know what to build. As the artist, you are the one who knows what needs to be built and AI can help you.
Now if you extrapolate from that, then it becomes apparent that if this technology is perfected (which it will be), then the marginal cost of production will be reduced to near zero because you won't need cast, crew, props, wardrobe, locations, gear, or any of that physical stuff. You'll just need a good idea and the skills to be able to tell it well like David Fincher. This does not mean it won't cost anything to make a movie, however, because new service providers will still charge, but it certainly won't cost 100 million.
Now with 5G, that's going to create a much faster and stronger Internet, which essentially means being able to do more powerful things online like rendering and editing hi res synthetically generated media or collaborating in digital spaces with your team to edit the shot or location. Like imagine location scouting with your DP, only instead of being in the real space, you're in the digital representation of that space. And with 6, 7G, and beyond, it'll just give us the ability to do more things online, which will become more important when synthetic media dominates the film industry (that part is my bias, but whatever, that's what I believe so there ya go.)
With blockchain that's harder and is less apparent, but imagine instead of going through a major studio and legal company to work out a complicated contract for a major production, you can basically do it like Turbo Tax, only with the same flexibility you would have at a major studio and law office.
That means actual deals with serious money involved can take place on platforms full of independent creators because it's safeguarded by the platform, yet trustless at the same time so you don't have to put full faith in that platform and worry about whether the money or contract will go through. You don't have to worry that the other person is gonna screw you over because you can program the contracts and lock it in place before any work is done.
That will make it way better than what Neflix can even offer right now, which isn't transparent at all, which means you have to put full faith that a bunch of shady suits are gonna give you a fair deal. But then there's a whole bunch of other things like equity crowd-investing (asset tokenization), which is what Kickstarter is actively working on right now, a smart move. That's literally crowd-sourcing, only instead of getting a thank you letter, you're getting a meaningful dividend for your investment...If the movie works out, that is.
So imagine Chris Nolan starting out for the first time on a filmmaking platform. He makes his movies and people start to notice them. But instead of just making movies, he tokenizes his films or even his own online production studio and opens it up for anyone to invest in. You put in 1000 dollars and buy x amount of his coins for .004 cents. In a few years, he gets hired by studios who by now are only major investors of movies and owners of franchises and popular IP rather than producers, themselves. So they hire Nolan to make Batman (all done online with a small, but highly skilled indie team) and the movie is such a massive hit, your 1000 dollar investment just turned into $250,000 because Nolan's Coin shot up to a dollar.
The crypto bubble was a sham, but if it did teach us anything it's that network effects can have a huge impact on the price of a coin, meaning if a coin is popular enough, mountains of people will invest in it like Doge, only replace Doge with a highly reputable director like Nolan or Spielberg. Doge is a meme joke, but Nolan and Spielberg are highly skilled people who are producing actual value, which means the coins are actually backed by something.
But then there's the really crazy idea, which I'm not entirely sure will happen, but people are most certainly working on it and I don't know. It could work though, but yeah, lets say blockchain exists in every corner of the Internet. Theoretically you could create an interoperable way to auto-track every single piece of content put up online, from entire videos to an idea posted on a forum, which means you can flag copywrite infringement much more easily, help others avoid accidental copywrite infringement, and give people small dividends for contributing their ideas to a writer who ends up putting it in their stories to make money off of.
Again, that's a very tricky problem to solve, so who knows. But all of this is very challenging and although nothing is ever certain, this is my best guess as to some of the things we might see in the future and my reasoning is simply what's happening in the labs and in the markets right now as well as human nature and how we usually respond to technological developments.
Essentially, it boils down to our natural desire to take the path of least resistance. And if making Hollywood-quality films can be done using synthetic media, cheaper, faster, and more comfortably at home, then it's pretty obvious that over time, more and more people will prefer to make movies that way and if that happens then it will most certainly change the industry as we know it.
But again, this is my opinion and it's certainly fine for you to disagree. I just wish you wouldn't make fun of me for it. I'm a person on the other end of the screen, after all. And for the record, I do love my own farts, but only because I take a special pill that makes it smell like Febreez. Thank you, NASA! (kidding, of course).
"Perhaps we’ll have to endure this for a while, but it's possible that not too long from now advances in AI, 5G, and blockchain will significantly reduce the cost of production and marketing down to near-zero."
What does Blockchain and 5g have to do with marketing and production costs? It seems like they're just buzzwords to most people and they have no idea about the technology.
I mean, they are buzzwords, but behind the buzzwords are real things. They just have a bad reputation because we were exposed to them when they were not fully developed and in the middle of a massive economic bubble, so there was all this money pumping into companies who were shilling it out to give themselves hype without realizing they were too soon. But just because they came early didn't mean that everything they said was false.
It's a lot to digest and I'm just giving a top-level easy way to understand the implications of all of these things. But if you're really interested, there's tons of content out there and believe me when I say that it will take you down a rabbit hole.
Spielberg and Lucas predicted that technology would allow creative freedom and independent film quality would rival Hollywood productions by now. That was about 30 years ago. I don't think they factored in marketing. As your article intelligently lays out, marketing budgets are what keeps independent filmmakers shackled. There was a time when I hoped a good Facebook campaign or a TikTok meme for an indie could compete with giant marketing budgets. But even that can't compete with the marketing power of IP. Having characters that your target audience dressed up as for Halloween when they were 5 is going to trump a good social media campaign. I hope you are right, and the next technology wave helps push indies, but I worry that those in power will leverage it to keep eyes on existing IP that they have a vested interest in.
Yeah, marketing is a serious challenge because even if production costs are reduced, there's still the issue of getting your film to the rights eyes and to enough of those right eyes. I think it will be possible to solve this problem and I suspect it will have to do with more sophisticated forms of targeted marketing through precision-based recommenders.
Right now you have to spend a lot of money just to get all those eyeballs to see it and then when you have 5 or 10 million people looking at your trailer or movie poster, only a small percentage will actually watch the movie, so you have to increase the number of people who see it by 30+ fold if you want enough people to see it and make a return.
And although this is extremely challenging and likely won't come for a while, I think it's at least in the realm of plausibility for someone to invent a more precise way of getting the attention of the hundreds of thousands or millions of specific people who have a 99.9 percent chance of checking out your movie. So instead of spending millions to get millions to see it, you're spending an affordable amount to get almost all of the the right people who will be the most likely to like or love your movie.
However, that's a double-edged sword because to get to that kind of precision marketing requires more data on people and given that we have zero data rights as of now...Yeah, that's a huge problem lol. So, definitely not saying that this will be an easy road full of candy and children's laughter.
It's gonna be very contentious on many fronts, but whatever happens, everyone, rich and poor, weak or powerful, will have to adapt, so if powerful enough technology can be democratized enough to destroy the leveraging power of big studios dangling money, resources, and connections, then they'll have to figure out a new way to stay on top with all of their money, and it seems the path of least resistance will be to continue leaning on their IP while heavily investing in new projects created by indie filmmakers that are showing huge promise. So ideally, an inverse where you let the global film community create the content and then pump a bunch of money into the projects and people who show the most promise within that massive pool of competition.
Fun stuff to ponder on. Really appreciate you checking it out, Ken, and great comment!
I can't wait for the advances in 5G to shape the future of movies, too
I read something recently about the Supreme Court striking down the antitrust ruling that stopped studios from owning cinemas. Surely this will have a major effect on independent film-making...
Oh man, if you think that's a head spinner wait'll the debates come out about who owns what when AI-assisted media is popularized. They have to use training data, which means they have to use content from previously existing stories, so what happens when you have fragmented parts from other movies woven into your story? Not sure how that will be overcome, but I suppose they could theoretically use blockchain to auto-track IP so that distributed ideas and the original owners can be accounted for. But then again, we have tropes in movies all the time, which sort of copies other movies, but they're different enough so that it's not a legal issue. And since the creator will have to work with the AI instead of just let the AI do it, they can modify ideas so that it becomes their own.
Nicholas Van Orton from The Game, not van Owen. Not a good look when you don't get the character's name right.
Lol, you're right I mixed up my movies. I was thinking of the guy who played on Jurassic Park II. Thanks for pointing that out. Made the change!
So, simply put. There will be more unwatchable garbage by filmmakers who should have kept their output to making vacation family films.
Have you seen the number of awful short and feature length films at film festivals?
This is true, but if you think about it, it'll be like photography. You'll see a lot of garbage, yes, but you can find websites with millions of stunning photos. So while there will be a lot of garbage, there will also be a lot of great unique content. Furthermore, if we integrate AI into the educational component of learning how to write and make films, then we may see more creators making better content. However, I doubt that could match the number of films that will suck because at the end of the day, it's really hard. But I'll take a mountain of garbage if it means getting significantly better movies than what we see from Hollywood, today.
This is some of the stupidest shit I've ever read.
Is there a specific reason?
You try to make you narrow opinion sound like fact.
Lol my apologies. I just didn't want to have to bombard it with "In my opinion" or "I personally think." It's an opinion piece so I figured that was understood.
Whoever hired you is stupider then you and that’s saying something
Stupid is as stupid does.
How do you make a living writing such utter nonsense. I bet you love the smell of your own farts
Out of curiosity, what specifically do you believe is utter nonsense?
Okay, so I'll admit I agree with your first half of this piece, in that corporate Hollywood has eroded the artistry in film storytelling. But, you are reaching for the stars in suggesting AI, 5G, and blockchain will somehow fix this? Artificial intelligence is decades away from being able to achieve what you suggest, and I suspect your bias in this argument lies with your personal project. Everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon these days without actually considering the vast and complicated implications of the technology. You fail to explain the significance of 5G. And then we arrive at blockchain, which in your other article, you propose as a solution for independent investors to overcome Hollywood financing and trust issues? Hollywood has a problem with studio monopolisation, risk averse decision making, shady financing, and a complete lack of meritocracy. If you want to rescue Hollywood then the five major studios who take 80% of the box office revenue need to be regulated, as does the quite frankly insane amount of money thrown at supposed talent.
Yeah, that's fair criticism. I'll try to answer as best as I can. So, lets start with AI. First and foremost, calling what we're building right now AI, is a misnomer. It's not actual AI. It's machine learning, which can mimic certain aspects of the human brain, but not the entirety. So In sense, you're right. We're a long long way from actual AI and there's a very good chance that it'll be much longer than decades, if it's even possible in our lifetimes.
But what people are building with regards to machine learning (not actual AI) will be able to do what I described because it's already been accomplished in a rough form and will only get better. Here's a company that's already operational and doing it: https://www.synthesia.io/post/the-future-of-synthetic-media
So, this does mean at some point we will have something like Dalle II only instead of generating images, it will generate frames for a movie. Therefore, you will be able to one day direct your film by texting or talking to a program. No, this does not mean it will make a movie for you, if left to it's own devices. But it does mean that you can communicate to it and it can approximate an output based on your commands. So think of it like having a skilled helper who can do things, but doesn't know what to build. As the artist, you are the one who knows what needs to be built and AI can help you.
Now if you extrapolate from that, then it becomes apparent that if this technology is perfected (which it will be), then the marginal cost of production will be reduced to near zero because you won't need cast, crew, props, wardrobe, locations, gear, or any of that physical stuff. You'll just need a good idea and the skills to be able to tell it well like David Fincher. This does not mean it won't cost anything to make a movie, however, because new service providers will still charge, but it certainly won't cost 100 million.
Now with 5G, that's going to create a much faster and stronger Internet, which essentially means being able to do more powerful things online like rendering and editing hi res synthetically generated media or collaborating in digital spaces with your team to edit the shot or location. Like imagine location scouting with your DP, only instead of being in the real space, you're in the digital representation of that space. And with 6, 7G, and beyond, it'll just give us the ability to do more things online, which will become more important when synthetic media dominates the film industry (that part is my bias, but whatever, that's what I believe so there ya go.)
With blockchain that's harder and is less apparent, but imagine instead of going through a major studio and legal company to work out a complicated contract for a major production, you can basically do it like Turbo Tax, only with the same flexibility you would have at a major studio and law office.
That means actual deals with serious money involved can take place on platforms full of independent creators because it's safeguarded by the platform, yet trustless at the same time so you don't have to put full faith in that platform and worry about whether the money or contract will go through. You don't have to worry that the other person is gonna screw you over because you can program the contracts and lock it in place before any work is done.
That will make it way better than what Neflix can even offer right now, which isn't transparent at all, which means you have to put full faith that a bunch of shady suits are gonna give you a fair deal. But then there's a whole bunch of other things like equity crowd-investing (asset tokenization), which is what Kickstarter is actively working on right now, a smart move. That's literally crowd-sourcing, only instead of getting a thank you letter, you're getting a meaningful dividend for your investment...If the movie works out, that is.
So imagine Chris Nolan starting out for the first time on a filmmaking platform. He makes his movies and people start to notice them. But instead of just making movies, he tokenizes his films or even his own online production studio and opens it up for anyone to invest in. You put in 1000 dollars and buy x amount of his coins for .004 cents. In a few years, he gets hired by studios who by now are only major investors of movies and owners of franchises and popular IP rather than producers, themselves. So they hire Nolan to make Batman (all done online with a small, but highly skilled indie team) and the movie is such a massive hit, your 1000 dollar investment just turned into $250,000 because Nolan's Coin shot up to a dollar.
The crypto bubble was a sham, but if it did teach us anything it's that network effects can have a huge impact on the price of a coin, meaning if a coin is popular enough, mountains of people will invest in it like Doge, only replace Doge with a highly reputable director like Nolan or Spielberg. Doge is a meme joke, but Nolan and Spielberg are highly skilled people who are producing actual value, which means the coins are actually backed by something.
But then there's the really crazy idea, which I'm not entirely sure will happen, but people are most certainly working on it and I don't know. It could work though, but yeah, lets say blockchain exists in every corner of the Internet. Theoretically you could create an interoperable way to auto-track every single piece of content put up online, from entire videos to an idea posted on a forum, which means you can flag copywrite infringement much more easily, help others avoid accidental copywrite infringement, and give people small dividends for contributing their ideas to a writer who ends up putting it in their stories to make money off of.
Again, that's a very tricky problem to solve, so who knows. But all of this is very challenging and although nothing is ever certain, this is my best guess as to some of the things we might see in the future and my reasoning is simply what's happening in the labs and in the markets right now as well as human nature and how we usually respond to technological developments.
Essentially, it boils down to our natural desire to take the path of least resistance. And if making Hollywood-quality films can be done using synthetic media, cheaper, faster, and more comfortably at home, then it's pretty obvious that over time, more and more people will prefer to make movies that way and if that happens then it will most certainly change the industry as we know it.
But again, this is my opinion and it's certainly fine for you to disagree. I just wish you wouldn't make fun of me for it. I'm a person on the other end of the screen, after all. And for the record, I do love my own farts, but only because I take a special pill that makes it smell like Febreez. Thank you, NASA! (kidding, of course).
Incoherent drivel
Could you provide more details, if possible? Be nice to get some constructive feedback. Thanks for checking it out.
"Perhaps we’ll have to endure this for a while, but it's possible that not too long from now advances in AI, 5G, and blockchain will significantly reduce the cost of production and marketing down to near-zero."
This author..."author"...is a complete idiot.
Man, I wouldn't want to be him...Oh wait....Dammit.
What does Blockchain and 5g have to do with marketing and production costs? It seems like they're just buzzwords to most people and they have no idea about the technology.
I mean, they are buzzwords, but behind the buzzwords are real things. They just have a bad reputation because we were exposed to them when they were not fully developed and in the middle of a massive economic bubble, so there was all this money pumping into companies who were shilling it out to give themselves hype without realizing they were too soon. But just because they came early didn't mean that everything they said was false.
It's a lot to digest and I'm just giving a top-level easy way to understand the implications of all of these things. But if you're really interested, there's tons of content out there and believe me when I say that it will take you down a rabbit hole.