REFLECTIONS ON A PROJECT CALLED: BLUE

It’s been an incredibly busy past three (or four? Yikes!) weeks. I’ve definitely let my ‘fear’ of not wanting to be a shit filmmaker stop me from getting out and capturing footage for my documentary BLUE, and playing in the editing suite. This really comes from a tendency to intellectualise everything I do, then follow through exactly. What I’m learning is that filmmaking can’t possibly be an intellectual exercise, not purely anyway. This is surely a given, but I had to learn it. Filmmaking is also obviously a very creative exercise, and the style of essay film I’m making very creative by virtue of it’s exploratory premise. So, there were some issues early on about my ability to really do justice to the strong ideas I had formulated in my Treatment, which was extensive.

However, I am savouring and absolutely enjoying the process of making BLUE. I’m learning so much, SO MUCH. Making a film on your own means the buck starts and ends with you – all my decisions create this film, the responsibility is all mine. This initially worried me (see earlier blog posts about ‘not being revolutionary’), but I’ve found since completing the Treatment and recently after collecting a shit load of footage to play with, that it’s such an evolving process. While it’s been important for me to revisit my Treatment, the project has equally evolved after contact with each participant.

The film itself is getting there. My three desired participants have been interviewed! Donna’s interview is locked off, Gerry my wonderful artist’s interview is locked off (she blogged about me!), and the interview with my laid back surfer Peter is cut but I’m not 100% decided on it at the moment. My opening sequence is cut, and I’m recording the voiceover with my soulful and very excited actress Katharine tomorrow. This is going to be a really important step, the voiceover. Robin mentioned that you don’t want it to appear like the voiceover has been shot to the film, or the film edited to the voiceover, but some synthesis in between. However, in the editing suite its become clear that I can’t really know timing of cuts until I have a backdrop to it (maybe this is the wrong approach, but it’s making sense to me?). I ended up recording the whole voiceover myself just to get a sense and have something to edit to; the script was drafted, edited and completed weeks ago. The sequences I’ve been messing around with and the script may both need to be altered to what my actresses brings.

It’s allowed me to move forward though to the more ‘self conscious’ part of my film, the three unique expressive sequences which follow each interview. These sequences are a collection of footage I’ve shot, mixed with archival footage that will explore an idea raised by the participant and visually tell the story of the woman in voiceover, as well as ruminate on the colour blue. This will definitely be the more time consuming ‘editing’ part, where the interviews were relatively straight forward. These sequences require a SHIT LOAD of footage to draw from, requiring a SHIT LOAD of shoots and therefore equipment borrowing, which can sometimes be inconvenient. A shout out to the Techs who are incredibly helpful and willing to share their knowledge despite stupid university heads who would rather undermine their generosity.

Anyway, in Film-TV2 we’re having rough cut screenings in class this week and I’ll only have completed about 70% of my film, so it could interesting. I have to finish off Peter’s expressive sequence which is very roughly half done, begin Gerry’s, begin Donna’s and shoot the Outro shot (a lingering take of a single object).

The next step will be to address sound. Including finding the perfect piece of music for my credits and Outro. There will not be any other piece of music, so I need to consider what sounds I want to layer in post within expressive sequences.

Caught up.

Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour

This is not a post for actors.

Good, now. Bruno Latour’s article ‘On Actor Network Theory: A Few Classifications 1/2’ aims to dispel myths about what exactly actor-networks are. Good.

He says that three misunderstandings are due to common usages of the word network itself and the connotations they imply:

  • Network being a common technical meaning in the sense of sewage, or train, or subway, or telephone ‘network’. Recent technologies often have the character of a network, of exclusively related yet very distant element with the circulation between nodes being made compulsory through a set of rigorous paths giving few nodes a strategic character. Nothing is more intensely connected, mroe distance, more compulsory and more strategically organised than a computer network. An actor-network may however lack all the characteristics of a technical-network.
  • The actor-network theory (ANT) has very little to do with the study of social networks. These studies, no matter how interesting, concerns themselves with the social relations of individual human actors – their frequency, distribution, homogeneity, proximity. ANT however extends the word actor – or actant – to non-human, non individual entities. ANT aims at accounting of the very essence of societies and natures instead of the social network which adds information on the relation of humans in the social and natural worlds. Anything, provided it can be the course of an action. It can be institutions (eg. the ABC), individuals, technologies…
  • The actual meaning of the word ‘network’ has ontological (existential) roots; it is a change in metaphors used to describe essences from thinking of surfaces, to filaments, as in, nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections. Initially, this begs one to think of modern societies as essentially fibrous, thread-like, wiry, ropy but these connotations don’t capture notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, structure, systems. ANT aims to explain the effects accounted for by those traditional words without having to buy into the ‘ontology’, ‘topology’ and ‘politics’ that goes with them. This theory was developed by students of science and technology claiming that it is impossible to understand what holds societies together without “reinjecting in its fabric the facts manufactured by natural and social sciences and the artefacts designed by engineers.” ANT is therefore the only way to include (‘reinject’) these ideas into the understanding of social fabrics – through a network-like ontology and social theory.

Latour continues that  Actor Network Theory is a simple material resistance argument; strength does not come from concentration, purity and unity, but from dissemination, heterogeneity and the careful plaiting of weak ties. ANT doesn’t start from universal laws – social or natural – it starts from irreducible, unconnected localities, which then, sometimes end in connections.

He calls it a foreground / background reversal. This is what Latour says it the most counter-intuitive aspect of ANT; that there is nothing like networks, there is nothing in between them. Apparently to Latour this makes ANT a reductionist theory, but he goes on to try and demonstrate that it may be a necessary step towards an irreductionist ontology. Brian Morris unpacked this point in class, saying that traditionally approaching critical studies, the way one goes about it is to read the artefact then understand its context and how it works to create meaning in that object. Latour advocates switching that to instead favour the context – complex network.

He begins to characterise networks by delineating some of their properties:

  • Far / close: thinking in terms of networks removes negative proximity – elements which are close when disconnected may infinitely be remote if their connections are analysed, yet conversely infinitely distant appearing objects may be close when their connections are brought back into the picture. “The difficulty we have in defining all associations in terms of networks is due to the prevalence of geography…the geographical notion is simply another connection to a grid defining a metrics and a scale.” The notion of network helps us to lift the tyranny of geographers in defining space and offers a notion which is neither social nor ‘real’ space, but associations.
  • Small scale / large scale: the notion of network allows us to dissolve the micro- macro- distinction that has plagued social theory form its inception. The whole metaphor… A network is never bigger than another one, it is simply longer or more intensely connected. A network notion implies a deeply different social theory.
  • Inside / outside:

Hmmmmm. Will be looking forward to getting some context on this reading next week.

“The biggest money is in the smallest sales”…and Kevin Kelly

This week I revisited a reading Adrian set weeks ago by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail, which I’ve already mentioned here before.

Anderson’s article astutely considers the challenges of broadcast and other media in the Internet Age; from the constricting physics of broadcast technologies that through limited resources rely on aggregating large audiences in one geographic area, to the problem of marketing unique films for profit (in a hit-driven industry). He said:

In the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all…

But most of us want more than just hits. Everyone’s taste departs from the mainstream somewhere, and the more we explore alternatives, the more we’re drawn to them.

He acknowledges that in recent years this ‘alternative’ content has been ‘pushed to the fringes by pumped-up marketing vehicles’ built to order by industries that desperately need them. He said:

Hit driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.

Today, Anderson says, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance, and the differences are profound.

Anderson references Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s s 80/20 rule from Week 8: People generally perceive that only 20% of major studio films will be hits (same for TV shows, games, mass market books)… However, Robbie Vann-Adib CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company evidences his own user statistics to counter that 99% of the top 10,000 of his some 150,000 song titles are rented or bought at least once per month. His point is that each month thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried. He’s saying that the hit-mindset is old; we think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of production. What Vann-Adib is discovering is that there is a market for the ‘misses’ too (and because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market)!

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

Anderson also puts the misunderstanding that ‘only hits deserve to exist’ down to a lack of understanding of what people want. For instance, the assumption that there is little demand for stuff that isn’t carried by major department or grocery retailers – if people wanted, surely it would be sold, right? This thinking is an equation of mass markets with quality and demand, when in fact it often just represents familiarity, good advertising and a broad and probably shallow appeal. What do we really want is a critical question, now.

These are important lessons for someone thinking of becoming a producer!

What Anderson introduces as the Long Tail in the example of Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service where, in every instance of adding thousands of songs to their already massive library, those songs always find an audience, even if just a few people a month.

“You can find everything out there on the Long Tail.” 

Here there are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre. Foreign bands, obscure bands on even more obscure labels – many of which don’t have the distribution clout to get into larger labels. And a lot of crap – which is easily avoidable by smart database searches and go unpaid for unlike the shitty songs hiding in the middle of that $20 CD tracklist. He says:

Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits.

That’s a big thing to say. Anderson quotes venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws, “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.”

The market that lies outside the reach of the physical retailer is big and getting bigeer. This is the Long Tail.

The reason for this in-depth revisit of Chris Anderson’s article is because I came across a blog by a man named Kevin Kelly. He has multiple websites / pages, and is a really decent example of someone using the Network as a place to connect / share/ host their various interests with an audience. Very interesting place.

He reminded me of Adrain Miles – older guy who’s totally down with it in a way that the Network has somewhat become a driving force of their life. Just watch how animated Adrian gets about the Network in Symposiums – he earns a living from being a teacher of this stuff, and talks of the things he’s shared with his kids about it. Likewise, Kelly set up a hilarious website of Cool Tools he thought his kids should really know about (like excellent quality pencil sharpeners). It’s not difficult to tell that Kelly would have a huge readership; he gets Tweeted about, and even featured in one of the first This American Life episodes! Now look at me spreading his links all over the internet like a devoted fan!

Someone on my Twitter feed linked me to a great post of his titled 1,000 True Fans. He riffs on this idea of the Long Tail by first acknowledging this:

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But he notices that the people left out of the Long Tail equation are the creators; the artists, the producers etc. Yeah! What happens to us!? His answer to artists wanting to escape the ‘quiet dolrums of minuscule sales’ is to find 1,000 true fans. He says the gist of 1,000 true fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Hmmmm? Kelly says it way too well for me to not just frigging quote him again:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

Right. But isn’t that what producing-people have always aimed for anyways – someone to buy their stuff which equals some kind of profit? Maybe not as specifically. Kelly contends that 1,000 is achievable; it happens by very directly engaging ‘lesser fans’ and converting them into True Fans. This means picking up 1,000 people from the sales flatline of the Long Tail and bringing them ‘up’ to the fandom that exists right before the peak of popularity (Kelly has a nifty diagram of this).