From Paul Worthington, Future Image:
Today we are nearing the democratization of video.
In the past, the most powerful communication technology has not been accessible to most people.
Even with camcorders, digital video, and email-scale compression, most people could not easily or affordably capture or express something on video and then share it with a wide audience.
Now, thanks to web-based sharing sites, they can.
As exemplified by YouTube, anyone can post a short clip, and thousands if not millions of people may watch it.
In 1999, I was over-enthusiastic about the possibilities of digital video for both production and distribution: With my friends and family, I started to create my own 12-hour TV serial.
But dreams of being a mini-mogul faded after many months of trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules into a video production -- akin to herding cats.
Also, many of my projections were wildly optimistic: developments I thought were a few years away have yet to arrive.
Nonetheless, it was the most fun I’ve ever had -- and I think most of what I foresaw in 1999 will still come to pass eventually.
After the jump: my still-very-lenghty business summary from the previous millennium, with some names changed to protect the guilty.
[Such as the show’s name is changed to just “the show.”]
The Concept
The show is a new TV series — 15 hour-long dramatic episodes -- that series tells a continuing story of supernatural suspense set in a fictional small town located in the Sierra Mountains above Yosemite.
This series is the first effort for our production company, formed from local people all living and working in the Oakhurst/Mariposa area near Yosemite.
The rationale behind the show is that owning finished content will be much more profitable in three years than it is now, than it has ever been — thanks to on-demand broadband video, as well as other changes in the distribution and accessibility of entertainment.
Also, once we have completed this first series — we will have a tried and tested method for making more productions with speed and efficiency.
We'll strive for quality that is indiscernible from the best that Hollywood has to offer. This is not an impossible dream, and is detailed in the full business plan below. We can achieve it with planning, preparation, and the latest digital video technology and equipment. High-caliber cameras and professional quality post production on a desktop computer are available now for very little money — and match the production values of the tools that just a few years ago cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In fact, the minimum financing required for this production is already in hand, and the new equipment — pro-grade digital video camera, wireless mics, boom crane, dolly and tracks, handheld camera stabilizer, portable monitors, Dual 500 G4 Macintosh computer, etc, have been purchased and are now in use.
It’s key to remember that making film and TV is Not That Hard — people do it everyday, and many first-time efforts succeed. We have the intelligence, manpower and necessary funding to make 15 episodes of serial television. The production company is already proceeding with the filming; the first episode is near completion.
The Shape of TV To Come
In the very near future — within three to ten years — the average person in the Western world will have access to on-demand entertainment. They will have a TV-like device with computerized file management and storage, and a high-speed connection to the central servers of content providers.
Everyone will have the capability to find new entertainment simply by telling this TV system what they’ve enjoyed in the past. The system will then automatically suggest works that both producers and the general audience recommend based on an individual’s stated preferences.[“4800 people who also like the series Bonanza and the movie Unforgiven suggest you watch Gunsmoke.”]
Any show a person selects from these recommendations will be ready for viewing on the home entertainment system in a matter of minutes, with payment automatically going to the content server — and the producer.
Nothing in the above scenario is far-fetched:
• High-speed bandwidth will be available to most homes in America and Europe this decade.
• Pay-per-view systems are already in place.
• Databases of recommendations based on customer history and preferences are already on the web.
• On-demand, personal-preference-based broadband entertainment will soon be here.
When it is here, the show will be ready — with the first independently-owned complete serial shot in the digital age. We will capitalize on the direct distribution enabled by on-demand broadband, and market the series to thousands of viewers. This represents an ongoing source of revenue.
Low-cost Quality
The technology to make the content of the future is here today. The last ten years have brought incredibly rapid development, miniaturization, cost cutting and speed improvements. Digital video capture and editing tools now deliver — for $10,000 — capabilities that simply were not available for ten or even 100 times that cost a decade ago. Ten grand will now pay for a camera, sound equipment, editing tools and more, all of sufficient caliber to match the standard for video content set by the Hollywood television industry [Not for projected film.] If one does it right, the product of a $10K system can look as good as what America is used to watching every night.
Can amateurs make a quality show, and make money for themselves and investors?
Yes.
Study the history of Hollywood and filmmaking worldwide, and you will notice that time after time beginners have made well-received and/or profitable movies and TV shows. The most obvious case is the now-cliché example of The Blair Witch Project: the movie makers had never written or shot a full-length film before; the actors were amateurs; the filming equipment was all low-cost. Through a unique approach and intensive marketing, the film made tens of millions.
Yes, film and TV production is a skilled profession. However, those skills are “necessary” for the utmost in production efficiency, for being part of a well-oiled Hollywood crew turning out one production after another. The crew for the show has not made a TV production before, but it has been studying and training in preparation for this venture, but it is now investing the long hours required for completing a professional-caliber product without the prerequisite years of experience.
Also, acting talent is a huge cost for Hollywood productions — often a significant percentage of the entire film’s cost goes to a few salaries. Even a no-name cast requires union minimum fees and would run in the hundreds of thousands for the total cast needed for 20 hours of finished material.
This production will use local, amateur talent. Using locals not only saves money — it will give the production a unique look and feel, with a cast that doesn’t look like every other Hollywood collection of models/actors.
We will shoot the show with local non-actors because that’s who we are; because it gives us advantages of authenticity and economy; and because we can.
On our production, we can roll the camera [s] as long as we want. Digital cameras use low-cost miniDV cassettes: $10 for 90 minutes. Digital cameras are small and light weight — no crew required, just the camera operator / cinematographer. Digital cameras don’t require excessive lighting. The DV camera doubles as the sound recorder — no additional expensive sound recording equipment is required, and there are no synching problems in post production.
Compare that to film: Shooting film costs $1500 per hour of footage. Of course, to make an hour of anything you’d shoot at least three times as much footage as you finally use — for a cost of $4500. Shooting DV, we can take ten times the footage — and still spend less than a hundred bucks for media.
Using digital cameras means that when we are shooting a scene, we take twenty minutes to set up, not hours. And our amateur actor can take 30 tries to get a line right — to speak it naturally, believably, and with emotion. We’re not burning film, there is no extra expense.
It is our belief that just about anyone can “act” in these circumstances. And because the tape keeps rolling, we can do long takes of back and forth, letting our non-actors get “into character” and build emotion as needed. We’re not limited to 10-minute reels of film.
This also allows all the actors to try different approaches, even different lines and scene ideas — and thus helps everyone feel more a part of the production team, a creative member, not just an automaton following a script and a director.
In film, every time the director says “Print,” the production pays for developing the film — just to see if the shot worked, and to have something to edit.
With DV, we know right away if we got the shot — we can see it on the camera’s monitor, or play it through a portable display. We can instantly learn from mistakes and try again; we can see what worked and what didn’t, and see how to try a different approach for any scene.
To edit, the material goes straight from the camera to the computer: no developing, no digitizing, no conversion from one format to another, no loss of quality,
All the takes come together in the editing into a seamless, fast-paced scene that looks like it was acted by professionals. The viewer never knows it took 30 takes…
It also helps that we’re using local mountain people to play — local mountain people. No “acting” is required such as, for example, an modern-day New Yorker to play a 40’s European…
Despite DV freeing a production from many of the requirements of film or even pro-grade TV analog video, the show won’t lack for production values; we won’t settle for the flat staging and lighting you might see in a home video. We will dramatically light and stage each scene, and use striking camera angles and powerful camera movements. But thanks to the small, light cranes and dollies that work with the small DV camera, these are all much simpler to do — and well within our reach.
The show production will also benefit from our location. The show will look authentic and real because it is shot on real locations with real people. While this is true of some movies, it is not the case of most TV shows — they are almost all shot in studios with Hollywood casts. We will have scenes set in the forests, on the lakes, in grand old wood-paneled hotels — and it won’t cost us anything. Every scene will be filmed in locally-provided private homes and businesses, or outdoors on private land.
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The revenue for the show is potentially huge; it is also potentially non-existent. It is also at least one year in the future from the completion of primary production [filming the actors]: the company won’t sell any DVDs or license any broadcasts until many months of post-production, marketing, and manufacturing are completed.
While the primary business goal is to hold onto the series for a perpetual stream of revenue, the Company may at some point sell the series in its entirety — lock, stock and all rights. If and when that were to happen, the ongoing nature of the plan as stated below would be moot, but profits would be distributed along the general lines described herein.
What is the long term potential return on investment or hours?
Possibly nothing, of course: the final product could be lousy, and even great movies and TV series can fail to find an audience.
Or it could be quick and large: with the Actor and Writer strikes about to hit Hollywood, the networks are facing a crippling dearth of content. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox or even USA might desperately need to purchase whatever content they can — and a completed 20-episode TV serial would be very appealing, and could fetch 1/2 million bucks per episode. That would result in an immediate profit of $10 Million.
Of course, there are no guarantees that the show will set the world on fire and rake in the big bucks.
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