>In the end, people want high quality entertainment, and it's hard to compete as an independent against sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in budget (and that's excluding advertising).
I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue.
>With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low
Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.
>> In the end, people want high quality entertainment
> I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time
I wouldn’t read that as the quality of the movie itself, but the technical quality of the production. You can have movies that are technically great, but that lack a story. But I don’t think we’ll see many more movies that have a good story with low video quality. When you can get a good 4K video from an iPhone, something like “Clerks” isn’t going to work nearly as well as when we had to use physical film and you could only afford to use so much of it.
> Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents.
Meh. Similar to music production, filmmaking itself has become ever more affordable on the technical and on the software side, DaVinci Resolve is available for free (and the Adobe suite for ~60€ a month), and thanks to digitalization distribution is relatively painless too (since you don't have to produce and copy literal reels of physical film, but can ship around Blu-rays or SSDs).
A feature-length film however will always need many hundreds to thousands of hours worth of work for everything from planning over shoots to post-production, there isn't much that can be cut there.
I would say most indie movies should be shot like theatre plays. Focus on acting and telling the story, rather than physically recreating every detail. Thinking about it, they already do that sort of...
I know this sounds clichéd but I'm really not that impressed by the big-budget Hollywood offerings of recent years. It feels very recycled and risk-averse most of the time, I've taken far more interest in long-form 'television' (ie streaming series) and independent content creators on YouTube. I know YouTube has deep issues in itself but that's a problem with the platform rather than the medium I think, a much more solvable issue.
>With music, the situation is different. You can get high quality recording equipment for well under 10K $ these days or rent a studio for a couple of days for cheap and release on Soundcloud, which means the barrier to entry is ridiculously low
Then perhaps this is the place to start, developing new technologies that reduce the barrier to entry for independents. It's interesting to compare the sitution for film to that of music, the last few years have genuinely been some of my favourite for music as a whole because of exactly this: the low barrier to entry means a lot of truly talented artists can rise organically to prominence and streaming services can tailor their recommendations to the point discoverability is much easier. In comparison a lot of more traditional music offerings sound stale and risk-averse because they have to be in order for the labels to recoup their enormous investments in artist promotion.