How new interest in VR could re-ignite the music video and album sales.
Not wearing headphones.
There's been a lot of chatter recently about VR (and AR) from the usual suspects. Apparently the tech is a lot better looking now, you know, realistic and immersive.
The immersive part always makes me laugh. I can be immersive with a pair of headphones and a decent binaural recording. I can be immersed reading a book. Imagine! I digress.
The point was, the narrative goes, VR failed in the 80s/90s because it was clunky low resolution shit.
True dat.
VR - then.
VR - now.
It was also true that gaming in the 80s/90s was clunky low resolution shit. It fucking rocked and a new industry was born - well documented in crowdfunded Bedrooms To Billions for one (I particularly like the founder of U.S. Gold admitting that he had no idea what he was doing).
So VR failed, 8-bit gaming skyrocketed through to the consolidated industry we know today. Stay with me.
Sitting passively wearing headphones. And that other thing.
I believe that VR may continue to fail whist it is physically non-passive. It will appeal to paintballers and lots of other people but who will actually prance around all day in that get up? I don't see it being as big as console gaming (famous last words of course). You can sit playing games at a console all day. VR all day? Be my guest.
Gaming, in common with watching movies, or watching a hybrid of the two - a Twitch stream - is largely passive, hypnotic.
Contemporary VR you must be awake standing up looking around bending reaching tripping over your furniture.
So even though today VR may look amazing it's is not a medium to be frolicking in for hours on end around staircases.
So, by my reckoning, VR must become a more passive activity to succeed - whatever success is nowadays.
VR reminds me of 3D in the cinema - it's going to be rolled out every generation to see if it sticks.
Anyway.
Passive VR. Immersive. Remember what I said about headphones and binaural? This has lead to a boom in Youtube videos promoting ASMR - sounds that make you feel good - and discussions around frisson - music that makes you feel good.
Strikes me that ASMR and frisson typically occur when the subject is passive rather than running around having all senses abused and bruised.
Still no headphones.
So if VR is to become a household medium, how could we shoehorn VR with sounds that make you feel good? Music, of course. Ambient soundscapes. More. No doubt over time a grammar would develop more akin to cinema than gaming (but Twitch is evidence that lots of people enjoy watching games passively and this goes right back to the days when computer games were in the arcade at the seafront - I remember watching that guy beat Space Harrier, awesome!).
Music video can be a great experimental landscape, as indeed can music itself.
VR is so fixated on the vision it forgets the wave.
Ignore the tech companies, ask an anthropologist.
Or, of course, not.
Persuading anyone that they need a helmet to listen to the latest album by the current big thing won't be easy. That's why a new category needs to be invented, and a progressive company needs to be first in it. Which is where it all falls apart. No smart money here! (unless the helmet plugs into a lightning port).
'EyePhone' VR, 1989. Note single cup headphone, d'oh.
No, not some euphemism for my Little Shop work on Hayling Island, this is more to remind me what the Deer Studios production slate is at this moment.
Whilst the world must wait for the Provincial's chilling horror short Dark Is A Long Way (coming 2016 ... we hope!), the Airninja movie method has been persistently seeing acquisition and edits through to final production.
1. After successfully collaborating with Mark Handley for Pompey Princess, we are now discussing potential for a video for his Christmas single. If it happens it will happen fast and within a couple of weeks.
2. On the theme of Christmas, I shot the interview with Graham Stansfield (famous keyboardist of Rare Bird fame amongst other fascinating things) to support the upcoming release of his new Christmas album release.
3. Earlier this month we had the first production meeting for another Mark Handley video, this one called Bella Ballerina - expected to shoot Jan/Feb 2016. We have great talent and crew lined up, technically elevating the production away from pure airninja-ry but remaining true to the spirit!
4. The next short film by award winning director Chris Jupp. Currently in pre-prod/development. I expect to be recording production sound and edit producing on this show. Likely shooting Q1 2016.
5. A dementia related project, or two. I have one ambitious project in development and another more practical, smaller, project slated to shoot over-night some time this winter. The one may lead to the other.
6. Longer term, the making of a feature length documentary on the work of prolific low-budget film director Michael J. Murphy. I have gathered several new interviews to augment the FilmRaker interview with the late director. This is an ambitious project in terms of cataloguing the material and assembling it into a coherent, comprehensive narrative without alienating Murphy's fanbase - but also allowing it to be accessible to anyone else.
Below is a small tribute video assembled from this last ever recorded interview with Murphy, and screened at his funeral earlier in 2015:
7. Recently completed edit of found-footage for the video to Owen Troman's single Winter Child (presumably another Christmas release). I worked on Owen's previous single in a similar fashion - finding footage and mashing it up into something symbolic for the track.
There are many other side-projects I am involved with but I am on the periphery or only providing services on-demand. Two most notable are both for Trash Arts, schedules TBA.
Talking with co-conspirator Evil C about our next January film production, I was reminded about how AirNinja germinated from the tactics used filming and completing "The Original Soundtrack" over a two week period in 2009.
The project was a success, here's a brief trailer:
I thought I'd dust it off, and see if any insights still stood today. I've reprinted my essay below, but do check out the others that were part of the same project.
We live in interesting times. Avatar reportedly is the most expensive film in history and is the culmination of 10 years work. It’s projected to make $1 billion globally. Cameron is advocating 48fps and stereoscopic acquisition. The film is almost three hours long.
How on earth do you get to make films on such a scale?
Let’s start by paraphrasing a piece of Cameron’s advice to filmmakers yet to have made a movie: “Start by making a film. Complete it. From then on you are negotiating budget for your next one”.
But that quote’s probably two decades old or more. From a by-gone era - it’s from the era of scarcity when not everyone had access to the means of making a decent movie. We now live in an era of abundance where punters will accept anything from shakycam smartphone footage to 4K RED, or anything inbetween. Shooting at 1920 x 1080 (the same resolution the Star Wars prequels were acquired at) only requires a modest investment with the huge advantage that you can also go tapeless.
In the era of abundance you need to be able to stand out from the clutter. Cameron largely does this on reputation (“From the director of Titanic, Terminator, Piranha II”, etc). How can you hope to match that reputation? Do you even need to? Zen Buddhism has a good piece of advice, “begin by beginning”, in other words get out there and do it, make a fool of yourself until you’re comfortable with the process. With the technology abundant (therefore affordable), it doesn’t make sense to hold back if all you want to be doing is running around out there making movies. If you want to raise finance and stay warm and dry, study accountancy, wear a suit, go to meetings and act conservative.
It wasn’t really until April 2009 that I’d realised how things had progressed with the technology - and how affordable moviemaking had become to outlaws such as myself. Having just signed up to Twitter I was invited to take part in the first #2wkfilm aka two week film challenge - shoot, edit, finish a feature length movie in a two week window before the end of May ’09. Up to that point I’d basically been spinning in neutral since the completion of my mockudrama ‘Crooked Features’ which was shot standard definition on miniDV tape with the Canon XL1 and a Sennheiser K6/ME66.
Seeing #2wkfilm as a way to get the fire started once more I started looking around for a means of acquisition. I already owned a Panasonic Lumix TZ which could record 848 x 480 and a bunch of professional boom mics with a Sound Devices 702T. All I needed was a script. And crew. And actors. And locations. Etc. I only had about two weeks to sort all this out if I was to meet the deadline of the end of May ’09. Oh, in that time I also upgraded my Lumix to a TZ 3 which shoots 720p (1280 x 720).
Well, we did it. The result was ‘The Original Soundtrack’ which screened on home turf alongside the other completed #2wkfilm entries at the Portobello Film Festival. The intent was never to make money from this particular venture. It was to make connections with local moviemakers, test a cheap SDHC card tapeless workflow, and chalk another one up in the IMDb. Secondary objective was to promote the local musicians without whose work the ‘Soundtrack’ part would not have been possible.
In aggregate the two versions of ‘The Original Soundtrack’ (700MB and 2.5GB version) on mininova have been downloaded 5,500 times. Somewhat predictably, DVD sales have been anemic (though to be fair it’s not like I’ve given the product any marketing push whatsoever). It was never meant to make me a profit though (the DVD is sold at cost), but it has added considerably to my wealth of connections and experiences.
In comparison I’ve had short film work on Archive.org for several years (always the progressive, me) and the most downloaded there is ‘Adult Contacts’ at 60,000 times. It’s been there so long I can’t remember when I uploaded it. It’s also my directorial debut (well, with real live actors anyway) if you’re interested in my take on “two people talking in a room” from 1995. The final cut is just under seven minutes but funnily enough I remember the original cut was almost 15 minutes long. Yet, now, I can’t remember what I cut out. I do remember cutting between a Video8 deck and a NICAM VHS deck and some crappy Sony LANC protocol which was not frame accurate; being really jealous of my mate who was editing on Media100 NLE. Anyway, I digress.
Part of my “problem” is that I am a part-time moviemaker. Like many outlaw filmmakers I have a day job, a family, and a life. I just don’t have the energy for self-promotion and I don’t have the bravado to go full-time freelance. I like to eat, and so do my kids. Taking part in the first #2wkfilm has enabled me to re-engage locally and led to my enrollment onto the second #2wkfilm. That, however has turned out to be an entirely different kettle of fish.
‘The Fix’ is my second #2wkfilm effort although currently I disqualified it: although we shot the rushes over just five days, the remaining time was not enough to complete the movie to fine cut (though I did get it to a very rough cut and survive a bout of the ‘flu). The big difference here was bringing a production designer on-board and having access to Rennie Pilgrem’s back catalogue as well as a commitment for some scoring. The production locations were also more ambitious, everywhere from an autumn forest to a small studio space at Ealing. I also shot using a Xacti at 720p and recorded sound single-system (poorly but mostly adequately, the horror) with my recently acquired used Neumann RSM-191 M-S mic. Lesson: my next movie really must be shot double-system and that pretty much precludes it from being a #2wkfilm. It’s expected that ‘The Fix’ will be completed by June ’10 (some way off from the #2wkfilm target of October ’09) but that’s the great thing about being an outlaw - no rules, no deadlines, all my own terms.
To conclude, Hollywood finds itself at a juncture, similar to that when the printing press arrived in Europe in the 15th century. The printing press was a revolution for many reasons, and it put many scribes out of work. The advantages of the printing press were obvious to almost everyone and production costs were 700% less than employing scribes. I guess the scribes weren’t too happy about that.
In the 21st century is it a necessity to spend $300 million to tell a story on celluloid? Will outlaws become organised and create a parallel industry leaving Hollywood to wither on it’s own sick vine. Or perhaps efforts like Paramount’s to keep a slate of $100,000 movies will appease the masses and put the outlaws out of a job. One thing’s for sure. No one can predict the future. Everyone can sidestep the little bits of history repeating. Me? I really enjoy home cinema.
It's been a busy month. Until the next post, enjoy this Christmas single from UK's The Provincials (an awesome Big Star cover).
What has this MV got to do with the AirNinja Movie Method? Well, for starters the opening line of dialogue and hymn were recorded by booming my Apogee MiC/96k and recording direct to iPhone 6 Plus using an app called SimpleMic. Let me know how you think that sounds?
