[sanjiallblue]

It's an interesting proposition to kill Hollywood, but I don't exactly think it's going to be killed so easily, or that it's anywhere remotely resembling close to being "dead". Just examining the profit margins from this year alone paints a picture of a vibrant and healthy industry and overall employment in the industry is actually doing quite well considering the state of the economy. Although, full disclosure, I do work in production as a media producer (reality TV, variety TV, single-camera, digital magazines, games, social media, features, etc.). I was also very fortunate to be mentored by one of the former ranking executives of MGM.

That mentor taught me a great deal, but one of the most fascinating things I learned was that these executives do not understand how the internet works, at all. Their days are scheduled down to the letter so they simply don't have time to figure this kind of shit out. So they pay their lawyers to figure it out for them and that's the source of the cancer of misinformation in Hollywood studios, Copyright/IP lawyers. Their jobs have evolved to depend solely on finding 'infringement' wherever they can and then making it seem as terrifying as possible to the execs that employ them. These are the people responsible for outright lies such as "100 billion in lost revenue".

This misinformation eventually became the dogma of the entertainment industry. I can't tell you how many people I've worked with in the industry, wildly intelligent people, that honestly believe piracy is the single greatest threat to the entertainment industry. What's worse is that they conflate basic concepts like file-sharing with the selling of boot-leg DVDs in some back-alley market in Calcutta. The disconnect with fact and reality is just truly astounding.

That's why the first line of defense should be to open a dialogue with Hollywood. Before we vote any Congresspeople out and before declaring "War on Hollywood" there needs to be an open campaign to combat the lies that are pervasive in Hollywood itself. Because honestly, after all we've been through in the last 10 years, do we really need more wars? Is that the lesson we're going to take away from Iraq and Afghanistan?

The people who work in Hollywood are fellow humans and fellow Americans. They aren't malicious invaders, they're people who are just irrationally scared for the future of the industry they love. If you declare "Let's Kill Hollywood", you immediately become part of the "Them" to Hollywood's "Us". You fire the first shot of a War that you never had to fight in the first place and one that will only hasten the urgency with which even more draconian legislation would be pursued. All of which could be easily avoided.

Creating effective channels for communication between the informed members of the tech industry and Hollywood should be the first priority of any initiative that was realistically and maturely seeking change to the kind of legislative agendas being advocated by groups like the MPAA (the RIAA is a different story, that's a case of rats on a sinking ship trying to prevent anyone else from getting on the ship so that they can make money off of the glass-botton tours.)

That being said, I'm not against (in any way) the idea of funding start-ups to explore exciting new maxims of entertainment or helping to shrink the cost of production for film/television/gaming. That's brilliant and deserves praise for being supported. However, it's the call the War I find so very unsettling.

I think I've made those points clear enough so I'll follow-up this post with some ideas to kick around that would help bring production costs down for smaller-scale film/television production along with some notes concerning certain realities surrounding the different aspects.

EDIT: Grammar

[sanjiallblue]

Okay, so some ruminations:

To create a film/television show you are generally going to need these things:

Script

Time

Reliably Available Crew

No matter what you do, you will always need money to accommodate these three needs to produce a project in any kind of time frame that could allow such productions to ever turn a profit and allow you to keep making films. Even if everything is going to be CG and you don't need a locked location, crew doesn't need to be driven, and no one is Union, people still have needs that can't always be interrupted. Usually, that is the need to eat and drink to perform their tasks reasonably (and filmmaking can be some fucking grueling, albeit fun, work.) The rest of the time, it's making a living. Money allows you the freedom of time. If you're making a low-budget feature, that's generally going to take between 15-30 days of principal photography alone. Trying to schedule that kind of a production around your actor's shift at the Quik-Stop is a fucking nightmare.

So finding a way to finance these smaller productions gives the cast and crew the freedom they need both financially and chronologically.

It seems the best way to do that would be some form of microfinancing infrastructure similar to Kickstarter. There's been some marginal success on Kickstarter itself for film production, but I'm not aware of anything that's actually managed to gain traction. So a service that was actually completely specific to film projects that could match scripts, with time/location and reliably available crew (pre, principal and post) would be a wildly powerful tool for filmmakers (that could potentially eliminate the need for a centralized physical location like "Hollywood" as the technology has pretty successfully caught up).

Okay, the next big problem is going to be equipment rentals. They're expensive, it sucks, but it's a reality of production. An equipment rental service that caters specifically to low-budget next-generation film production that ships all over North America from multiple warehouses with helpful and reliable customer service is necessary to decentralize production.

Focusing a little more narrowly on what YComb readers could help with, scheduling and budgeting. Collaborative scheduling and budgeting tools are extremely expensive, particularly services that exist in the Cloud. Drafting a set of scheduling/budgeting tools that can be collaborated with online without the crazy charges other companies have would be a game changer. I think the only kind of open source project attacking this problem is CeltX and they don't have a budgeting component. If anyone is interested, the industry standard tools for this have generally been EP (Entertainment Partners) Budgeting and Scheduling, with cloud-based services gaining popularity over the last two years or so.

Each of these three ideas could be expanded upon radically, so I would love to have some discussion on them.

[crewtide]

I totally get why this rfs was posted. SOPA is pretty egregious, and the YCombinator folks went beyond complaining and decided to do something about it. There's nothing more positive than funding startups to create the better world you envision.

I certainly appreciate that they didn't gloss over the fact that SOPA's potential damage to civil liberties and the world economy was what raised their awareness of the viability of startups in this space. People should publicly stand up for causes they believe in.

I've been looking into this space for a while with plans of disruption. I see a lot of posts on here from people who work in the industry talking about how expensive it is to create high-quality video. As an independent filmmaker and entrepreneur, I only somewhat agree (on the price of hiring indie filmmakers: http://crewtide.com/2011/11/03/price-of-video-narrative-vs-v...). There are a number of things that make Hollywood productions so expensive, like name actors or car crashes/explosions. But another big one is location, location, location. Hollywood production studios are expensive because they can create any location you can imagine. Crowdsource to award-winning independent filmmakers (as my startup will do) and each of them will shoot in whatever amazing-looking locations they know they can shoot in for free.

sanjiallblue writes as if every independent film shoot uses non-professional cast and crew -- that is ridiculous. In my recent shoot (we're releasing a six-episode thriller-romance web series around Valentine's Day) the only conflict was that one of our leads got into a play with the American Repertory Theater. I'm interviewing 20 independent filmmakers for my blog this month and all of them are full-time filmmakers -- some have day jobs shooting for local TV stations or editing for production studios, but most are full-time freelancers doing commercials, corporate work, music videos, and their own shorts and features.

By the way, brands are beating Y Combinator to the punch. Who has funded television since it began? Brands, and they're starting to skip tv and the exorbitant price of advertising there and create their own content. Since BMW's The Hire series early last decade, plenty of other brands have jumped on board creating their own mini TV shows (http://crewtide.com/2011/10/14/branded-entertainment-example...). You should really read these guys take on it: http://www.reelseo.com/every-brand-will-be-a-studio/. ReelSEO always has the latest news & best commentary on this industry.

Right now BMW, Kmart, YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu are still going to Hollywood to get their content produced, and they're paying through the nose. Kmart spent $100,000 per 8-mninute episode of a low-budget web series by going to Hollywood; an indie filmmaker could have made that for 1/10th the price with an all-professional crew.

[costee]

Well said, crewtide. There's a positive paradigm shift taking place, and you seem to be facilitating it.

[Gravityloss]

Generally agreed. You need to pay for people's time. That is 100% certain. (There can of course be exceptions with lots of volunteer time like Iron Sky.)

Is equipment so expensive nowadays anymore? I don't think so. You can buy most with one month's median salary.

You can use still cameras nowadays, as their sensors and processors have sped up and they've overtaken traditional cinema cameras of a few years back already. They work quite well even in natural light. (Especially if you use a hack and enable high bit rate encoding.) You can edit with a normal computer. There are led lights etc. Cranes and dollies can be much lighter, simpler and cheaper with this modern technology too.

There's lots of possibilities of "lean" film making with this new technology.

I presume the revolution would happen in documentaries first as the technologically adventurous people wouldn't generally be those who have grand visions or are good at organizing the other parts like scripts, talent, sets etc the whole "running a play" thing.

Hell, there are character centric Dogma movies like Open Hearts that get rid of a lot of fancy technical stuff, and it never bothered me when watching them.

Look at what guys like Philip Bloom or Andrew Reid make with ordinary cameras. The freedom is already there, people just don't know how to use it.

[caseysoftware]

Check out Browncoats: Redemption on how a movie can be produced relatively inexpensively.

iirc, they received ~$100k in cash and $250k in donated resources, equipment, etc. Yes, $350k is a good amount of money but compared to the production costs from a major studio, this is probably the catering budget.. and it's nothing for most of the VC's we read about around here.

(Disclosure: I was an extra and a buddy of mine was the producer.)

[Keyframe]

EP Scheduling and Budgeting could use an alternative - that's where a startup could make a difference, not a large one though. It costs $500 I think, that is a lot for indies, but not even a small dent in normal productions.

Final Draft is awful, but it's a standard, there are viable alternatives. I've bought 'Fade In' recently and am enjoying it, but I still have Final Draft and will continue to use it.

Largest contributing factor to cost is crew and set construction, equipment next.

[wj]

I've been working on an alternative for indies for a while now. Hoping to launch in the next couple of months.

[Keyframe]

Looking forward to seeing what you did and how you have approached the task of producing and scheduling productions.

[unoti]

I wonder how long it takes to make a southpark episode. Or one of those news reinactment cg segments that asian outfit is famous for. Perhaps new forms of media won't take the same shape or have the same factors apply.

[wj]

South Park makes one episode a week. From script to airing. They work very long hours during their season. If you're not part of the creative team you're still on call 24 hours a day during production.

There was a Comedy Central special on the process last year.

[rmc]

You're attempting to derail the conversation by making the tech/start up/hacker scene sound like they are being immature and not listening. Tech and the internet have been in mainstream conscienceness for 15 years. They have had time to learn. They have already fired the first and second shot with numerous laws like SOPA, the DMCA and others.

Rather than them being too busy, I believe they are too greedy. I owe them nothing.

[MrScruff]

The problem with this discussion is that it's an echo chamber for people who know nothing about the film industry. For people who do (a few of whom are valiantly trying to impart some perspective), most of the posts here are laughably naive. They are just as embarrassingly ill informed as when movie execs pontificate about the internet.

As someone stuck in the middle (a hacker working in the film industry) the whole exercise is rather depressing, and not because I think pg's startups are going to disrupt my source of income.

[sanjiallblue]

I disagree with your assertion as I was pretty plainly addressing YCombinator itself and, more specifically, its declaration.

I also fail to see how the mere existence of the tech industry somehow should mandate that studio executives understand how IT architecture works. In fact, I find that downright baffling how you could believe such a thing.

Your assertion that "they fired the first shot" is really the kind of rhetoric I was condemning as this isn't some kind of malicious attack born from intelligent observations of reality. Instead, it is misinformation born from overzealous and irresponsible legal analysis, a point which I detailed in my post and you aren't exactly addressing.

The final line is emotional and irrational and doesn't deserve a response.

[notahacker]

It doesn't really matter who fired first. What matters is whether you've got the ammunition to win. If you want to fight Hollywood you need to provide a more compelling replacement for its creative output and not merely a conduit for its delivery. Will Hollywood's legions of talent (and hacks churning out formulaic crap that sells extremely well) switch "sides"?

Well the book publishing industry could have been destroyed by now: its constituent parts have been replaced by digital distribution methods offering authors far better paper terms. But almost all top authors continue to accept big advances to do things the old fashioned way. And lumping Hollywood creatives in the "part of the problem" space isn't exactly the way to win their favour.

Similarities between hackers and painters notwithstanding, I'm not sure Ycombinator's skill in selecting the best engineers translates to disrupting the future of the arts. Which raises the possibility that throwing money at second-best alternatives is more likely to damage YC than Hollywood.

[userulluipeste]

You say that conflict is artificially generated by lawyers and that the war that it starts is in fact unnecessarily, but I disagree. Yes, we may blame lawyers for the most of the current situation, but this is not the only reason that is causing it, nor it will in the future. I see two main reasons.

First, it is the "creative distruction" that comes into equation. Hollywood is big, things change to much around and... I am sorry. It's not pretty sight, but like a lot of other legends of the "good old days", Hollywood ought to understand it's time and place ...in the history! You see, it's not only the technology that is changing (which also happened before, and with some hops and trepidation the classic media industry managed to cope with), but an entire paradigm around it. People are not satisfied with the old ways anymore, and the old ways is what I'm afraid that Hollywood can't and won't get over.

Second, it's a power game. When you get so much money to afford paying millions per year to lobbyists, to afford to change the rules of the entire game in your advantage, well... What we see is not coincidence. It's what was expected to happen. It's what happens in other industries also - just rise you head and look around. When you have power, you use it. You must be a fool not to use it. Even if you had some altruism somewhere inside, power corrupts people and when you are so disconnected like you described, it's just a matter of time till you forget things that would otherwise matter. So, when it comes to make judgments and take decisions, honestly - what is there left for you to consider?