It’s 2011. We’re all well acquainted with the ever-growing content on the web. Anyone can learn more technical information on the internet in a week than I did when I was in film school for 4 years (though the hands on doesn’t factor in). Best of all, content creators are often accesible to start a dialog about their work. We can learn. We can connect. We can watch…
Find Your Unique Angle
So… the internet is a gigantic vortex sucking us in, taking over lives, making the organic mechanical and the mechanical digital. I find myself making conscious notes about how the things I shoot relate to things “online”. Overnight, the world of video shrunk. There isn’t an angle, location, or character undiscovered. Depressing. But we’ve been here before. The invention of the printing press resulted in an explosion of authors ultimately leading scholars to conclude that there are only 3, 7, 20, 36 plots available to be explored. Writers didn’t stop writing. The amount of authors has only since increased. Finding a truly memorable book is a more challenging prospect in the noise of the marketplace, but money still changes hands and books rise to the best-seller list.
I digress. Forget about books, this is about filmmaking. There really isn’t much new out there. Resolutions increase and color gets more depth. As we’ve seen, “Everything is a Remix“. How do we find inspiration in that? What prompts the filmmaker to pick up the camera once again to film the same garbage over and over?
The answer I’m coming to is environment. You, the video/film/media maker, must carefully choose your surroundings. That means the people you know, the professional environment, the weather, everything. All of these things wrap into your frame of view into the world, which seeps into your footage creating something that HASN’T been discovered… you’re unique voice. Because despite having a limited number of plots, locations, characters, etc, your perspective is your own. Sure, it may and will be similar to those around you. So choose your environment carefully. Christopher Nolan doesn’t use the internet. There’s a lot to be said in that.
People are more impressionable than they would like to admit.
James Drake Films, Denver Video Production