Hollywoodn’t — Tales from the Digital Revolution

I’m going to get busy again with the spirit of redefining film.

Digital is a no-brainer these days. The film purists can balk about gamma curves and light response till the cows come home, I’ll shoot digital from here on out, thank you very much. The pros just so strongly outweigh the cons.

I saw a mockumentary recently in Seattle, called Nothing So Strange, which is being distributed online via BitPass. Micropayment technology that apparently works, one of the missing pieces in the equation I’ve been waiting for for years. Now if we can just get something like BitTorrent wrappered around an indie film line, we might get this distribution conundrum licked.

A friend and I stopped and chatted a bit with Brian Flemming after his film and he was a nice, intelligent, and funny guy. I liked his film — it made me think. Mostly about low-budget filmmaking and fake documentaries as a form more than any underlying issues. Still, it’s an entertaining piece of fiction disguised as reality, with a really nice faux web presence to support it.

Even more interesting are bits and pieces of his personal blog and his online “filmmaker’s diary,” especially notions copyright, copyleft, and of “open source cinema” in general. Hmm…I might need to contact him and see if he needs help with FreeCinema.org. I think there’s something really compelling in there.

Anyway, stay tuned. I’ve got a lot more to say on the notion of the future of film. Too much, maybe.