THE RACE TO THE BOTTOM

[David Lagos]

Marketplace of Ideas

Marketplace of Ideas

Attributing the new technology and new production methods that develop every few years, its understandable that this kind of process will happen.

More options and more perspectives become available. I echo the sentiments posted on here that talent eventually wins out because enduring artists never sit on their laurels but adapt and seek new ways to channel their creativity. However, there is that overlapping area when young guns need to earn their stripes and do it the hard way as well.

Much like the concept of the "marketplace of ideas", people involved in the commercial and corporate video production industry are subject to the context of the general product out there...."you can't appreciate the good, without the bad".

Yeah, some people are fortunate in that they circumvent the years of discipline and training some of you have experienced and get access to the most cutting-edge production technology out there, but that doesn't outweigh the errors they will likely make along the way which would never happen to a seasoned veteran.

The market floods every now and then but no matter what true talent and creativity will float to the top.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I'm afraid "devil's advocate" would go a little more like this. I find it hilarious that people who shoot TV commercials -- those disgusting assaults on our consciousness whose sole purpose is to sell us garbage we don't want -- are whining over making less doing it.

Good. Do something that benefits mankind instead.

TV commercials are the propaganda equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl's work, and not much different than the Triumph of the Corporate Will. They triumph, because they pay. No other reason necessary.

I haven't seen a single qualm about the elephant in the room, the intellectual whoring, using your craft talents to sell whatever the hell the "client" demands. Perhaps a little more waking up in the middle of the night screaming is in order. Sell some more diabetes and heart disease. Push that junk. Great job.

I would wager that the vast majority of independent films are directed by people who are fed by commercials and music videos--and that the crews working those films are able to donate free labor thanks to the generosity of commercial day rates.

If we all refused to help sell merchandise--either through Music Videos, Commercials or Corporate videos there wouldn't be the talent pool, payed well enough to volunteer for a week or two on an independent feature.

Unless you're the director, writer or sometimes producer--all you're doing is whoring yourself out to help them deliver their dream. And often commercials are the creative breeding ground for new ideas. While you wouldn't risk something truly groundbreaking on a 90 minute feature, a 30 second spot is the perfect arena to try out new workflows, new styles, new techniques and see how they work.

While commercials are often pretty soulless and insignificant to human progress--they're subsidizing and training the education of a significant portion of those who go on to deliver the meaningful, inspiring art that you aspire to see.
:emote_whack:

 

[Rob Gardner]

Hey, Joe, everybody works for a living. Every art-house movie still has to have theaters to run it or distributors of some kind and those are all commercial companies making money.

Other than film students, the only film community with which I have worked in which people talked unabashedly about making films as art, and never talked about the size of the budget or the size of the deal, was in Iran, where the government subsidizes the film community so that Iran can have movies in Farsi and keep western movies out. And those guys all try to work around that reality the best they can. They have their own version of selling out, because making movies is just expensive.

If you want an audience, whether on television, theaters or on the internet, outside of rare and extraordinary strokes of luck, you are going to be working for the man, one way or another.

But Harry's original point is very valid. There will always be fair budgets and fees at the top of the market, but it is the middle that is going away and the bottom which is expanding. If you are trying to sell yourself based on the production values and quality you will provide (talent, craft skill, and so on) there are less and less business people who care enough about that to pay for it. Look how reality television has gobbled up the air time. How important are production values, talent or craft skill to that genre, outside of the specific skills required to produce that kind of show?

And the displacements that come with technological change are an increasingly repeated pattern. Think back to the days of graphic arts and printing before desktop publishing. A lot of craft skills became simply too expensive. Same with the music business. It wasn't amateurs or hobbyists who took over the work, it was people who could adapt and work with the new technology and deliver the best stuff for less.

Distribution systems are changing fast. Production and post production technologies are changing fast. The entire professional landscape is changing. For many of us that will really suck (if we think in traditional terms), for the lucky and nimble ones it will not, but in any event, the train's in motion, so we can get on board or watch it go by.

I think it is important to keep in mind that with change there are always opportunities, but change is often painful as well.

I'm with you, Harry

 

[Harry Clark]

Thanks Rob. Well said.
Cheers,
Harry

 

[D Fuller]

TV commercials are the propaganda equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl's work, and not much different than the Triumph of the Corporate Will. They triumph, because they pay. No other reason necessary.

I haven't seen a single qualm about the elephant in the room, the intellectual whoring, using your craft talents to sell whatever the hell the "client" demands. Perhaps a little more waking up in the middle of the night screaming is in order. Sell some more diabetes and heart disease. Push that junk. Great job.

Joe,
Nonsense! I don't speak for everyone else here, but I think it does matter what you advertise. Would you do a commercial for Red? If the answer is "yes" then you need to rethink this position.
Artists have cone commercial work forever. Most of Rembrandt's work was commissioned. Most of what you know of Toulouse-Lautrec's work was done for advertising posters.
There is a great deal of difference between producing a promotion for a government that gasses millions of people and producing a commercial for a hospital's cancer center. Your comparison is ridiculous.
Last weekend I went to an exhibition of Avedon's work at the MFA in Boston. It is just brilliant work. And most of it is commercial.
I love commercial art. That's not to say that I love all commercials. I don't. But i don't love every film i see either. And I have refused work from certain clients, because I think it does matter that you work for clients you believe in.
OK, end of rant.

 

[Tim Hole]

I typically am never doing the same thing for more than a week. Im not quite sure how I got to do most of what I do. I advise on the exhibition side of digital cinema but I got asked to do that because my old booth manager from when I was a projectionist asked for my help since he got his new lofty position. I shoot films and art pieces or installations for people. Help with public funding for films. Shoot charity stuff for Amnesty, diabetes and Oxfam. Do post work for indie productions as well as effects work. On the side then I write direct and shoot my own narrative work. I get in some strange situations and work on strange projects. In pretty much every aspect of the world of moving image. The epitomy of jack of all trades master of none. I do still find it disturbing and disgusting that a film can have a budget of 100mil.

My brain works overtime, always has done. I had trouble structuring sentences as a child. I would start in the middle of a conversation, cut to the end, realise what I was doing, retract and start at the beginning. Initially I developed stories to occupy my mind as it was only way to calm my thoughts. If I didn't mentally wear myself out by the end of the day I would never sleep. My brain is constantly inundated with shapes, ideas and thoughts. Not troublesome thoughts I should add as I an a very relaxed and calm person by nature.

My point is there is always something going on, I'm always meeting new people and making contacts. If someone asks me what I am, I say I am a filmmaker because that is how u define myself not just what I do fir my day job. As long as I have a roof over my head and food on the table I don't care.

My films are what are important to me. I don't go searching for funding, I fund it myself. I shoot longer and pretty much do it all. I see the structure of filmmaking maybe slightly different to a lot of people. I have enough marketable ideas for feature films to last me till the day I die. Hundreds of ideas of things I want to experiment with in lighting, dialogue, camera moves, transitions of effects.

All I want from life is to create.

 

[Peter Matthes]

I'm afraid "devil's advocate" would go a little more like this. I find it hilarious that people who shoot TV commercials -- those disgusting assaults on our consciousness whose sole purpose is to sell us garbage we don't want -- are whining over making less doing it.

Good. Do something that benefits mankind instead.

TV commercials are the propaganda equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl's work, and not much different than the Triumph of the Corporate Will. They triumph, because they pay. No other reason necessary.

I haven't seen a single qualm about the elephant in the room, the intellectual whoring, using your craft talents to sell whatever the hell the "client" demands. Perhaps a little more waking up in the middle of the night screaming is in order. Sell some more diabetes and heart disease. Push that junk. Great job.

Joe ... hopefully you won't be visiting any Walmart and Safeway stores in the near future.

Perhaps you should pawn off some of your self-rightious crap on:

Ridley Scott

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

Spike Jonze

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I07xDdFMdgw

Terry Gilliam

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

David Fincher, Dino and Red #31

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

... and the list goes on and on and on.

The simple fact is, in the right hands, advertising can be elevated to an art form.

On rare occasion, it can even inspire and heal.

After the September 11th, 2001 attacks, Nancy Axthelm and her creative team at Grey were commissioned by the USPS to produce a commercial that would lift up the spirits of all Americans.

Unfortunately, this is the best copy that I could find online, but you get the idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe_bIf0rbE4

 

[Tim Hole]

What I have always found interesting is, although an obvious excursion, is the appropriation of surrealism in advertising. I find it quite incredible in fact how much of a large proportion of they are neck high on surrealist imagery.

Sorry was a bit off topic but thought would share my blatant observation.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

I'm afraid "devil's advocate" would go a little more like this. I find it hilarious that people who shoot TV commercials -- those disgusting assaults on our consciousness whose sole purpose is to sell us garbage we don't want -- are whining over making less doing it.

Good. Do something that benefits mankind instead.

TV commercials are the propaganda equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl's work, and not much different than the Triumph of the Corporate Will. They triumph, because they pay. No other reason necessary.

I haven't seen a single qualm about the elephant in the room, the intellectual whoring, using your craft talents to sell whatever the hell the "client" demands. Perhaps a little more waking up in the middle of the night screaming is in order. Sell some more diabetes and heart disease. Push that junk. Great job.

Yes, why don't you tell their children that when they need braces - I'm sure those children will greatly appreciate your pompous, holyier than thou post.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

I would wager that the vast majority of independent films are directed by people who are fed by commercials and music videos--and that the crews working those films are able to donate free labor thanks to the generosity of commercial day rates.

If we all refused to help sell merchandise--either through Music Videos, Commercials or Corporate videos there wouldn't be the talent pool, payed well enough to volunteer for a week or two on an independent feature.

Unless you're the director, writer or sometimes producer--all you're doing is whoring yourself out to help them deliver their dream. And often commercials are the creative breeding ground for new ideas. While you wouldn't risk something truly groundbreaking on a 90 minute feature, a 30 second spot is the perfect arena to try out new workflows, new styles, new techniques and see how they work.

While commercials are often pretty soulless and insignificant to human progress--they're subsidizing and training the education of a significant portion of those who go on to deliver the meaningful, inspiring art that you aspire to see.
:emote_whack:

Excellent points! I would add that many 19th Century painters were able to paint because they also did ads, and that now the ads themselves are seen as seminal art.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

I would wager that the vast majority of independent films are directed by people who are fed by commercials and music videos--and that the crews working those films are able to donate free labor thanks to the generosity of commercial day rates.

If we all refused to help sell merchandise--either through Music Videos, Commercials or Corporate videos there wouldn't be the talent pool, payed well enough to volunteer for a week or two on an independent feature.

Unless you're the director, writer or sometimes producer--all you're doing is whoring yourself out to help them deliver their dream. And often commercials are the creative breeding ground for new ideas. While you wouldn't risk something truly groundbreaking on a 90 minute feature, a 30 second spot is the perfect arena to try out new workflows, new styles, new techniques and see how they work.

While commercials are often pretty soulless and insignificant to human progress--they're subsidizing and training the education of a significant portion of those who go on to deliver the meaningful, inspiring art that you aspire to see.
:emote_whack:

Excellent points! I would add that many 19th Century painters were able to paint because they also did ads, and that now the ads themselves are seen as seminal art. Besides, I am tired of some people who see "meaningful art" only in that which focuses on misery and is ugly. There is much more to creativity, and life, than that. If one can't see that one needs therapy more than one needs another art grant.

Ads are often deeply insightful of the Zeitgeist - we can look at, for example, 1950s commercials now and get real insight into the values and morays of those times, much more than by watching some bizarre art film from that period.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

Hey, Joe, everybody works for a living. Every art-house movie still has to have theaters to run it or distributors of some kind and those are all commercial companies making money.

Other than film students, the only film community with which I have worked in which people talked unabashedly about making films as art, and never talked about the size of the budget or the size of the deal, was in Iran, where the government subsidizes the film community so that Iran can have movies in Farsi and keep western movies out. And those guys all try to work around that reality the best they can. They have their own version of selling out, because making movies is just expensive.

If you want an audience, whether on television, theaters or on the internet, outside of rare and extraordinary strokes of luck, you are going to be working for the man, one way or another.

But Harry's original point is very valid. There will always be fair budgets and fees at the top of the market, but it is the middle that is going away and the bottom which is expanding. If you are trying to sell yourself based on the production values and quality you will provide (talent, craft skill, and so on) there are less and less business people who care enough about that to pay for it. Look how reality television has gobbled up the air time. How important are production values, talent or craft skill to that genre, outside of the specific skills required to produce that kind of show?

And the displacements that come with technological change are an increasingly repeated pattern. Think back to the days of graphic arts and printing before desktop publishing. A lot of craft skills became simply too expensive. Same with the music business. It wasn't amateurs or hobbyists who took over the work, it was people who could adapt and work with the new technology and deliver the best stuff for less.

Distribution systems are changing fast. Production and post production technologies are changing fast. The entire professional landscape is changing. For many of us that will really suck (if we think in traditional terms), for the lucky and nimble ones it will not, but in any event, the train's in motion, so we can get on board or watch it go by.

I think it is important to keep in mind that with change there are always opportunities, but change is often painful as well.

I'm with you, Harry

The tech side evolves, but the basic talent for creating good music has not changed since Mozart. If I look at shooting Red vs. film, you use the same lights ( a few new models have come out in the past 5 years, but the principles are exactly the same) , the camera has a few new things to learn, but its not that different from 35.

There have always been cheap business people - in the day I suppose they shot DV or VHS or whatever, now they get some chump with a 5D and a $200 day-rate. It's not like people who now are fine with idiotic camera movements, bad framing, bad lighting and a total lack of story-telling skill would 10 years ago have paid top-dollar for a highly talented crew.

 

[Meryem Ersoz]

Excellent points! I would add that many 19th Century painters were able to paint because they also did ads, and that now the ads themselves are seen as seminal art.

I don't know. I just saw Snooki for the first time, in a television interview, and I have to say that I think Joe has a point! Talk about the lowest common denominator...bring on the zombie apocalypse!