Slashdot Mirror

I tried #blowjobs and nothing happened.

Could be worse. You could've received one of these.

Wow. This is so innovative. I can't believe someone didn't invent it and bring it to the internet before 2008 ...

http://5secondfilms.com/watch/captains-order

I know, I'm very happy to be in my mid-twenties during the age where the Internet is really exploding and realizing its power. There's are some *fantastic* people who create entertainment on their own and it comes out way better and more interesting than a lot of the crap on the telly. freddiew and Monty Oum come to mind as a couple of standout examples. Then there's there's loads of fun projects like SMBC Theater and 5 second films. There's even more "Mainstream" stuff (Internet-wise) like CrackedTV, CollegeHumor, and FunnyOrDie making original videos. I think in 5 years we'll really be at the point where the stuff on the Internet is as good as (if not more interesting than) the stuff on television.

The only barrier that needs to be broken is the duration of videos. Most of these places will put out 1-10 minutes of content a week. There's very little cohesive shows (like sitcoms or dramas) that I've found that can consistantly produce 20+ 22-minute episodes once a year.

Last recommendation: Next Time on Lonny.

If anyone else knows of any good shows, dramas, whatever hosted online (I'm particularly fond of stuff like Penny Arcade Television as well), please post them here in a reply. I'd love to check out some new stuff. I've almost entirely phased television out of my life.

My big hope for the future of movies is that technology is making movies less expensive to produce.

The more expensive a movie is, the harder it is to make the movie; and the more the studios start to mess with the creators of the movie. "We don't want that quirky unknown actor you like; you need to put in Johnny Depp." "The test audiences didn't understand the ending; you need to change it to make it clear that the good guy won." That sort of thing.

I read an interview with John Cusack right after Grosse Pointe Blank came out. He said something like "I'd love to give you a great story about how we fought the suits to realize our vision, but the reality is we were spending so little money that nobody cared about us, and we were able to make the movie the way we wanted to."

So, I predict that within the near future, it will be possible for a director to make a movie completely pure to his/her vision, by keeping the costs really low. Shoot everything with digital cameras. Have the special effects done at some unknown small computer effects shop in Korea or somewhere... or possibly even done by American university students for free. Hire unknown actors who will work just for the experience and accept royalties instead of big up-front money. (Or hire actors that Hollywood has already chewed up and spit out. I can think of several actors I liked who never got much respect in Hollywood.)

As for actors, you never know: you might even get semi-famous or famous people, as long as the time commitment is low. http://5secondfilms.com/ has had Peter Sormare do a couple of shorts for them, I presume for free. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was able to film all of Angelina Jolie's scenes in three days. Once Upon a Time in Mexico got all of Johnny Depp's scenes filmed early, and they had time to just improvise a couple of new scenes with him before he had to leave.

If you visit TheForce.net you can see a whole bunch of "fan films" that were done on a really tiny budget. The special effects are, in many cases, not bad at all.

I've seen plenty of stuff on TheForce.net that is better than Batman & Robin or Aeon Flux. For me at least, the best special effect is a good story; if I like the story, I'm quite willing to overlook a lot of other stuff.

I predict that not only is what I imagine possible, it is pretty much inevitable. Modern consumers have so many choices, that it is now impossible to drive everyone to see the same movies (or listen to the same music). Markets are fragmenting based on consumer's tastes, so it will be harder for movies to become true blockbusters. Keeping costs down and appealing to a specific demographic is one strategy for dealing with this, and I expect to see a lot more of it.

steveha

There are an amazingly large number of Star Wars fan films, and you can find them at TheForce.net. There are some really good ones. I recommend Duality and Bounty Trail.

http://www.theforce.net/

A few years back I saw a good Spiderman fan film. I Google searched it and stumbled upon a web site devoted to fan films:

http://www.fanfilms.net/index.php

By the way, this was the Spiderman fan film I was looking for: The Green Goblin's Last Stand. "The total production budget was $400, and it shows. However, it also shows what a small group of motivated individuals are capable of when they are focused on a single goal."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Goblin's_Last_Stand

Finally, you have only to look through YouTube to find *lots* of people who are making cool features. Pretty much anything by FreddieW, lots of stuff by jaymegutierrez (anyone on Slashdot really should watch "Clean the Fan"), Smosh ("Cat Soup").

http://www.youtube.com/user/freddiew

http://www.youtube.com/user/jaymegutierrez

http://www.youtube.com/user/smosh

And you 5secondfilms is awesome. They make 5 movies a week; they aren't all gold, but some of them are absolutely classic.

http://5secondfilms.com/

steveha

She could have quit like this: http://5secondfilms.com/watch/last_anchor_standing

At work I have a Windows PC, and I was always frustrated by the very poor performance of Flash video. The video would freeze, then unfreeze over a second later with the video frames in between just dropped. (When you are watching a 5 second film this problem makes the movie almost unwatchable!) And it's a quad-core AMD Phenom II system. It should be fast.

So now, I'm trying out 3.6.4 and the difference is stunning. Now the Flash video playback is perfectly smooth.

I still want WebM in HTML5 instead of Flash, but what the heck, this is working now and I'm happy about it.

Sample size of one, YMMV, etc. But I'm happy about it.

steveha