http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xint4_korn-throw-me-away-cj-johnson

I wrote, shot, directed, edited and distributed this music video for only the cost of the camera, which I pay for with freelance work. I’m thrilled that I can do all these things outside of the “system” and still produce something that could possibly be confused with a $1,000,000 video — or not. You decide. But I am happy with the $5,400 HD cam I used to shoot it, and the $1,100.00 power-pc I used to edit it, and YouTube for giving me almost 10,000 viewers so far. It’s a wonderful world of opportunity we live in right now!

I hold that the bottom line is a poor measure of the worth of a cultural work to society. It certainly shouldn’t be the primary measure.

Well said, jazzone.

While I agree that some of the content we see IS overproduced, I’m quite wary of Jeff’s gleeful cheering of a race to the bottom. There are some tremendously excellent works of media out there that just couldn’t have been done without a well equipped and highly skilled crew. We risk loosing these kinds of things when most project financiers assume that what content producers do is nothing special.

When is “just good enough” not good enough?

‘I’ve got a great way to liberate your journalists, get closer to the story, make the grammar of television more intimiate and informal.’

‘Hmmm sounds interesting - we’ll meet sometime.’

OR

‘I’ve got a way you can sack all those grumpy old unionised bastards who insist on taking lunch breaks AND get your journalists to be many times more productive’

‘Come on in..have a cigar!’

One of the interesting parts of the show is the 10 minute behind-the-scenes segment at the end which explains how some of the amazing footage was gathered.

For example a crew of experienced technical guys had to spend a month in a rainforest at the bottom of a deep cave full of cockroaches and bat shit. They had to light the cave and build a rig which would give a smooth tracking shot up this amazing mound of bat shit.

Then there was the first ever close up footage of a snow leopard hunting in remote Pakistani mountains. An incredible sequence of this beautiful creature bounding down an almost vertical slope in pursuit of its prey. A sequence which took a year to shoot.

What this illustrated to me was that if we want to preserve certain types of great television it will have to be a mixed economy. It’s easy to be zealous for the ‘fast moving, lightweight little guy approach.’

But I don’t see how you can create something like Planet Earth without extremely skilled technical staff using high end kit. Sure the price of the kit is likely to fall with time but it still takes large gobbets of BBC/Discovery/NHK money so you can have a guy up a mountain in Pakistan for a year staking out a leopard.

In the city, New York 1, provides their reporters with a single person rig. Do their standups look as good as the broadcast locals? Well, not really, but to the average non-professional viewer the packages are fine and get the job done sans entourage.

But with that came other demands for cost-cutting. Once they were doing what had been several people’s jobs at once, they couldn’t do any of them quite as well.

—–

I guess it makes sense that the drive to being more productive and making things less expensively would lead to overtaxed workers scrambling to keep up. I have seen this occur in multiple professions / fields in the last decade. There is a balance somewhere that we can’t seem to hit in our neverending pursuit to streamline. If the quality of media drops to the level of noise, who will watch it? If all the craftsmen disappear to be replaced by the cheapest widget, it may be profitable in the short term, but I can’t help but think we are flushing decades of talent and knowledge down the tube.

The Rosenblum experiement at the BBC has not been an entire success - some journalists have been liberated and have produced good stuff.

But an awful lot of crap has also been produced - badly shot pix with shitty sound which is then badly edited. Alas some of this embarrassing stuff has gone to air.

I know some BBC producers who are living with this and they know the quality of quite a lot of it is poor; often stuff gets commissioned but programme editors refuse to put it out because it is rubbish. Plain and simple rubbish which would only serve to undermine the BBC News brand.

I wonder if Rosenblum could answer this - if the BBC are such enthusiasts for your theories why isn’t Matt Frei (BBC Washington corr and the most admired packager among his BBC colleagues) running round covering the midterms with a PD150? Why didn’t David Loyn shoot and edit his own Newsnight reports from Afghanistan last week?

Could it be that the BBC are prepared to countenance some erosion of quality in their local journalism but when it comes to their premium products they know that having a skilled shoot/editor working with a journalist still makes for objectively better telly?

I make my living by both converting existing stations to far more cost effective models and by producing programming using small hand held cameras and cutting on on FCP on laptops. The issue is not technical, the technology is there. The issue is purely psychological. The architecture of television production was cast in the 1950s, when cameras were big, expensive and hard to operate and so were editing suites. The technology has made all that gear obsolete but the people who grew up in that world often cannot envision another way of working, or consider it ‘non professional’.

Several years ago, when I first presented these ideas to the Board of Governors at The BBC, they listened, then asked, “when you do yo believe this change will happen?’ I responded, “when all of you are dead, because you are the only ones holding this back”. Fortunately for me, (and for them) they decided to act sooner.

Such as The Blair Witch Project?

Cheap & dirty = authentic, shot by us

Expensive & slick = fake, shot by Hollywood Unions

Blair Witch or Lazy Sunday rely on the notion that the camera holder is part of the action and the cheapness reinforces that. This is currently surprising and increases the drama/comedy by making it seem even more realistic. But in the future, it won’t be surprising, because it’ll be more common.

I’ve seen the collapse of the economics of producing such shows coming for a long time. It’s been the most obvious since about 2001, when the cable news organizations went from a standard field crew of 5 to 2. The equipment they carried was reduced from 3 or 4 dishwasher-sized flight cases down to a laptop case and a carry-on suitcase sized bag. Local TV stations went from having camera operators, sound technicians, and floor directors, to having one computer operator in the booth driving robotic cameras, mixing sound from wireless microphones, and feeding text to the electronic teleprompter.

But with that came other demands for cost-cutting. Once they were doing what had been several people’s jobs at once, they couldn’t do any of them quite as well; certainly not with as much art and finesse. They had to produce the same number of air-minutes per day with less manpower, which meant that they had less time for fact-checking, research, on plain-old on-the-ground reporting.

Does the audience care that the production quality has dropped? I think yes and no. There’s a certain percentage of the population that thinks that good writing is obfuscation, good grammar and punctuation is foolishly pedantic, and thoughtfully edited and elegantly-produced audio and video is evidence of an attempt to deceive. But then, if you look at what’s popular in the podcasting world, as the mainstream audiences move to the medium, professionally produced content with traditional production values and well-known brand names are beating out all but a handful of the content produced on the fast & cheap by amateurs.

no. they can make tv dramas using webcams.

One argument for all the stuff though: TV’s, commercials and movies sure look and sound a heck of a lot better than most of the podcasts and things shot with handheld digital camcorders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no0WqYWdH74

Jeff is right about average people creating content, he just minimizes the issues with creating professional quality productions. Xeroxed church newsletters look much better since the invention of desktop publishing, but they still don’t compare with “Vogue”.

anonymous:
Usually I don’t respond to snide, unsigned remarks, but your ignorance of the costs of public education shines through in even such a short remark. Why don’t you go study the issue and see what percentage goes to salaries and what percentage goes to things you might consider “inefficient”. I’ll give you a hint to get you started: salaries = 80%. Now add in building construction and maintenance costs, educational materials, computers, sports equipment and all the rest.

I suppose you think highly trained professionals are overpaid at $30,000. If you want underpaid, under trained teachers than why don’t you teach your own kids. I prefer having experienced people guiding my kids education.

Jeff… YES SOMETIMES IT TAKES ALL OF THAT GEAR TO MAKE A SHOT!! Cinematography is an art. It’s a very creative and highly skilled art, far beyond the ability of a news-hack like me. Having said that, ZeFrank’s use of natural light and incredibly clever writing is also a highly skilled art. But as to your reference to all that “stuff”…would you ask Haskell Wexler or Jordan S. Cronenweth if they “needed all those lights”?

As for the union-bashing going on in the comments here…let’s not make this a zero-sum game. I know a great many hard-working union people, who risk their lives (i came perilously close to losing mine in Baghdad), sacrifice time with their families, and travel to the crappiest parts of the world because they believe in what they do.

So while I’m very excited about the promise of new media, I don’t think we should be celebrating the demise of what has been a noble calling to some of the finest people I’ve ever worked with.

Jim

Maybe if they cut back on catering they could have some working class kid work at CBS some summer.

And public education.