The media has long been considered to be the fourth branch of the the US government.
No longer. The media has lost its independence and most of its power.
It would be more accurate to call the Federal Reserve the fourth branch of government. This is a worldwide trend: central banks have new powers to set economic policy free from political interference.
Peculiar to the US and some other countries, though, is the creation of a 5th, security branch of government, whereby the FBI and NSA have broad de facto regulatory powers over the software and telecommunications industries...
The ads star an actual senior managing director of the company, a man named Yukawa Hidekazu, who looks much like what you imagine Japanese salarymen look like. In the first, Yukawa eavesdrops on two kids saying, "Sega video games suck. Playstation is much better." Melancholy, Yukawa heads to a bar, gets drunk, and on his way home scuffles with some thugs, who beat him up. The commercial ends with him collapsed in the doorway of his house, as an offscreen voice exhorts, "Come on, Mr. Yukawa, get up!"
{The ads have] made Yukawa a cult hero. He's recorded a hit single, a love song to the Dreamcast, and Sega printed up a limited edition of six phone cards with his image on them. At a games conference in October, people lined up for hours to have their pictures taken with him.
Re:BWP is a turning point
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
Another crock. See "Clerks" or "Pi" for movies that came out big out of Sundance and "made" it.
The Blair Witch Project will make well over $100 million. And that is the sort of thing that gets Hollywood's attention.
Money has nothing to do with artistic merit of course. But it has everything to do with why Blair Witch marks a turning point in how films are marketed and promoted (though not necessarily in how they are made).
Only "in your face" profits can make Hollywood change the way it operates, and the runaway financial success of BWP will do that. That's a turning point, by definition: things are done differently after compared to before.
Re:BWP is a turning point
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
·
· Score: 1
Very few people actually attend the Sundance festival, and many films there are well received by the critics but go nowhere.
It was the Internet that built the buzz.
Re:BWP is a turning point
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but they went with the traditional media ad campaign only after it was clear they had a hit on their hands, based on the early limited release.
Every movie has a website, but usually it's just an afterthought, outsourced to a web design company with little input from the moviemakers, and not a critical factor in the success or failure of the movie. BWP was different... the Internet "made" this movie.
...This burning desire to turn absolutely everything into an "important event". It is as if every member of the media had dreams of catching the important "turning point" in history.
Whether you love it or hate it, BWP does mark an important turning point. Not because of the low budget (that's been done before), but because this is the first movie that owes its (massive financial) success to the Internet.
Piles of money certainly get Hollywood's attention... it might not affect the way movies are made, but it will have a big impact on how they are marketed and promoted. The Internet will get a bigger chunk of movie advertising budgets.
That'll be a good thing overall... lots of small sites could use a cash infusion to stay afloat. Better still, movie advertising is mostly "impression-based advertising"... you're not trying to get people to buy anything on the spot, you're just trying to get their attention, build buzz, and grab a piece of their mindshare. Per-impression advertising is much better for websites than per-click or per-sale ads, which create a conflict of interest... you don't get any revenue unless you get people to leave your site, destroying the incentive to create rich content.
For anyone old enough to remember a time before MTV, music videos were just a novelty in the early 80s until stars were "made" by MTV and the music industry caught on to their importance. That was a turning point, and so is this.
Similar concept to Blair Witch (low-budget, eerie things happen in a dark forest), but this one was filmed entirely with digital cameras for a grand total of $900!
Blair Witch at $65,000 might be called a "low-budget" film, but that's still a ton of money. But if you can make a film digitally for less than $1000, then we're on the brink of something big... the greatest explosion of creativity since the invention of the printing press.
(It all started when somebody noticed that the commercials sold during the televised coverage of the Apollo-11 mission would have paid for the entire Apollo program.)
This can't be right. The Apollo program cost $24 billion in pre-inflation 1960s dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
The standard Russian "jcuken" keyboard layout for Cyrillic letters has some Dvorak-like characteristics.
The most common letters are index-finger keys in the center of the keyboard (all three rows), and middle-finger keys are the next most common.
It would be interesting if there was any comparative data on RSI frequency or typing speeds in Russia, or historical data on design considerations.
No longer. The media has lost its independence and most of its power.
It would be more accurate to call the Federal Reserve the fourth branch of government. This is a worldwide trend: central banks have new powers to set economic policy free from political interference.
Peculiar to the US and some other countries, though, is the creation of a 5th, security branch of government, whereby the FBI and NSA have broad de facto regulatory powers over the software and telecommunications industries...
There's an interest ing article in Slate...
Why does interesting appear above with an embedded space?
The actual HTML code is:
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There's an interest ing article in Slate about quirky TV ads for Dreamcast that are running in Japan only.
Clerks made $3.151m
Pi made $3.216m
The Blair Witch Project will make well over $100 million. And that is the sort of thing that gets Hollywood's attention.
Money has nothing to do with artistic merit of course. But it has everything to do with why Blair Witch marks a turning point in how films are marketed and promoted (though not necessarily in how they are made).
Only "in your face" profits can make Hollywood change the way it operates, and the runaway financial success of BWP will do that. That's a turning point, by definition: things are done differently after compared to before.
Very few people actually attend the Sundance festival, and many films there are well received by the critics but go nowhere.
It was the Internet that built the buzz.
Yes, but they went with the traditional media ad campaign only after it was clear they had a hit on their hands, based on the early limited release.
Every movie has a website, but usually it's just an afterthought, outsourced to a web design company with little input from the moviemakers, and not a critical factor in the success or failure of the movie. BWP was different... the Internet "made" this movie.
Whether you love it or hate it, BWP does mark an important turning point. Not because of the low budget (that's been done before), but because this is the first movie that owes its (massive financial) success to the Internet.
Piles of money certainly get Hollywood's attention... it might not affect the way movies are made, but it will have a big impact on how they are marketed and promoted. The Internet will get a bigger chunk of movie advertising budgets.
That'll be a good thing overall... lots of small sites could use a cash infusion to stay afloat. Better still, movie advertising is mostly "impression-based advertising"... you're not trying to get people to buy anything on the spot, you're just trying to get their attention, build buzz, and grab a piece of their mindshare. Per-impression advertising is much better for websites than per-click or per-sale ads, which create a conflict of interest... you don't get any revenue unless you get people to leave your site, destroying the incentive to create rich content.
For anyone old enough to remember a time before MTV, music videos were just a novelty in the early 80s until stars were "made" by MTV and the music industry caught on to their importance. That was a turning point, and so is this.
Don't let it stop you from seeing the movie.
I have bad motion sickness, I've thrown up on planes and buses when everyone else was fine, but was perfectly OK with this movie.
Just sit at the back of the theater, preferably in a cinema that doesn't have an overly large screen.
Amazon.com is heavily promoting The Last Broadcast
Similar concept to Blair Witch (low-budget, eerie things happen in a dark forest), but this one was filmed entirely with digital cameras for a grand total of $900!
Blair Witch at $65,000 might be called a "low-budget" film, but that's still a ton of money. But if you can make a film digitally for less than $1000, then we're on the brink of something big... the greatest explosion of creativity since the invention of the printing press.
This can't be right. The Apollo program cost $24 billion in pre-inflation 1960s dollars.
Look how long it's taking for Unicode to be adopted... will IPv6 be any faster?
It'll take decades... if it happens at all :-(