BY PJ SERUBBI
Have you noticed that the debate over using the internet as a means of broadcasting television and movies has centered on how to make it profitable?
Online Movies, Profit and Mass Media
At SECOND WINDOW FILMS, we believe in profit, too…but of a different kind. The mass media people call the internet a lean in format because it is watched on a small screen from an average distance of some 24 – 36 inches away. This certainly isn’t the traditional relationship we have had with audiovisual media. We have always watched from across the room or the auditorium, but clearly this new manner of viewing narrative and documentary film is too elastic to leave to the simple business paradigm of the old mass media. So far, all they’ve come up with to make the internet profitable have been banner and pop-up advertisements. SECOND WINDOW FILMS is based on a different idea: perhaps the profit online is somewhere else, somewhere business people just don’t go.
FREE MOVIES ONLINE are the way of the future
The conflict between artist and business person has always been simple: the artist wants his/her work to be seen – by any means necessary; the business person wants the artist’s work to be seen – under rigidly controlled circumstances, with wall to wall advertisements and kiosks and sales agents at every door. This latter model is all well and fine for the Hollywood types responsible for what the mass media routinely delivers on television and at the movies, but did you know that there are others who write, edit and make films?
Of course you did – everyone knows that there are scores of films made every year which have successful runs on the festival circuit and win awards – but finding those kinds of movies and films online is tricky, especially with the vast wellspring of cell phone video available on YouTube. I mean, it’s fun watching somebody’s drunken uncle blow out his knee while trying to ride a unicycle and screeching ‘Whoooop’ before toppling over sideways onto a buffet table. It’s great stuff, of course. It’s just not a film. The time it takes to watch it is the time it took to make it. That’s not filmmaking. That’s pressing a button twice.
Under the right circumstances, pressing a button twice is enough. If you’re flipping around head over heels in the center of a tornado, say…then yeah, sure, that I want to see. So press the button on that one, twice, but apart from the chance meteorological mishap, but is anyone really drawn in by some strangers Kodak moments?
FREE INTERNET MOVIES
With greater speed comes greater resolution,
and a new venue is born for post-festival films
So free online movies and films are the new frontier on the internet, and given the net’s ala carte nature, this should herald a golden age for new voices to find their own niche audiences online, without going through the filter of the mass media, whose objectives and priorities are often simply different from those of the artists. Unconstrained by the primacy of profit at the expense of the evolution of a polyphony of voices, the internet could be a context for a new American renaissance. This online process has been underway for a long time in the forms of blogs and pod casts, and now the net’s road is rising to meet the feet of the independent filmmaker.
You’ve already seen what’s been shown in the mass media…in fact, how could any of us miss it? Do an impromptu count of the faces and voices that ripple past your awareness each day and realize that, in a nation of 240 million people, it’s a little silly only watching and listening to this tiny group of a few hundred. In the old days of mass media, it was simply too expensive to experiment on producing programming that gave a venue to people and ideas that fell outside a circumscribed range of expectations. Profit is profit after all and no one would begrudge those entities their protection from unnecessary risk in the competitive marketplace of movie making, but that’s been their game. That’s been their measure of profit. Media production no longer involves the same insane costs to shoot, edit and fine cut high quality films, so there’s no reason why there can’t be a much wider pool of artists seen and heard.
The new internet multimedia broadcast paradigm is simple: see an artist’s free movie online when you want, buy that artist’s marketed film if you want. No coercion. No interruption. No irritation.
So yes, profit is a concern for everyone who turns out a creative piece of work.
At SECONDWINDOWFILMS.COM, our profit is in your viewer-ship.
See what’s more. There’s a lot of it out there.
Explore SECOND WINDOW FILMS
FREE, UNLIMITED VIEWINGS OF A NEW & GROWING ONLINE MOVIE ARCHIVE AT SECONDWINDOWFILMS.COM