The Fall of Traditional Entertainment Conglomerates

Advocatus Diaboli writes "We no longer live in the era of 'plantation-type' movie studios or recording houses. However large private companies still have considerable power over content production, distribution and promotion. Technology has been slowly changing this state of affairs for almost 30-40 years, however certain new technological advances, enabling systems and cost considerations will change the entertainment industry as we know it within 5 years."

Comments

The first distributed computer animation film?

[garyebickford]

I had the idea several years ago of doing a computer animated movie using a voluntary distributed computing model, like distributed.net or SETI@Home. Once it was scripted and storyboarded and the animation plan was complete, individual frames (or even portions or layers of frames) would be farmed out to folks to run on their computers. The complicated part would be that folks would almost certainly be able to assemble parts of the film prior to release, but that might be OK. Multiple scenes could be produced, so the plot could have multiple possible endings. If I were to produce part of the film on my home machine, I'd want to go to the theater and see how it all works.

My script idea was of three or four young kids, who fly in virtual fighter planes over a landscape that is based on the real structure of the net as a geographic metaphor. Of course cities and other facilities in the virtual landscape would match up fairly well with the real landscape, since the net does that already. I think the father of one of the kids is the one who invented the visual metaphor immersion system. They would discover one guy who was a bully or hood at school IRL flying his own plane (as a result of hacking into the father's system and stealing an early copy, that has some flaw the bad guy doesn't know about), and dropping 'bombs' (metaphorical visualization of inserting hacks) onto websites around the net. (I came up with the idea when most hacking was recreational, not commercial or political.) So these kids would have to use their own skills and tools to fight the hacker guy in virtual space, and also deal with him and his gang in real life.

IMHO that would be a great movie, and I'll bet a large number of slashdotters would love to participate. Heck, the profits could even go to support open source. And now it's possible to do it in 3D.

I even toyed with the idea of setting up a website where folks could work together to build the script and the story board. This could be the first 'open source movie'. I do own meatspace.us ... hmmm.