The Queen of Canada (Thing King, Sing King, Dring King Cinema)
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This is a vlog pondering the future of cinema in an internet world. It is more or less an excuse to hear Joni sing about Canada and experiment with some fragments of Moby Dick project. Since the project is taking so long (I’m at about 280 pages and frames… so I’m only a bout a third of the way through) I wanted to vlog a sort of stock for what will be the making of video. I’m acutually remixing from the i-movie of “I Drew Pictures” Vid. The “success” of that cllip got me thinking about why that vid touched a nerve and what that might say about future cinema: my own and the cinema at large. I don’t want the blog to slip into sounding like Caheirs de Wired… and I’m no where near as clever as Truffaut and Goddard and the rest of those French boys, but I have been thinking about internet films (or whatever it is that I do which in my semiotic days we would have just called text… or maybe linked text? I guess they call it New Media and leave it at that… maybe even because its so vague).
I spent some time on Youtube the other day where people can get a million hits with just talking head vids… getting by on personality alone. Some of it is funny,or interesting, or weird, but it got me thinking that at some point internet cinema is going to have to (or it’s going to do it anyway) grow up. By this I mean there’s going to have to be a business plan and a revenue stream if content is ever going to get beyond people acting silly and yammering about mostly other people’s videos. It’s going to have to tell complex stories. It’s going to have to have fiction and by this I mean actors and STORY and by this I mean writers. It’s going to have to move beyond the talking head and become cinema. Lately I’ve been thinking about cinema, which is to say in the same breath: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about money. In order to do more than just sit in a room talking to yourself, I mean the minute you start dealing with actors and decent sound and a location, you need a few bucks in your pocket. How will the new media creator get paid in an age beyond mechanical reproduction? What is the market for new media art in the age of digital means of production and reproduction? Clearly I haven’t a clue, but I’m hoping people will leave comments and help me to think about some of these questions.
(in progress?)
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March 31st, 2007 at 2:51 am
someone asked me to explain the concept of linked cinema a bit more so i said:
This is an idea that I hope to clariffy as this vlog soup simmers, but I was thinking of it as a film described by many eyes and many cameras many directors, that would be unified in the editing.
and also a thing that one could navigate using links like you navigate web text.
Renga (linked verse) is a form in which haiku poets would write part a poem sequence and then hand it off to the next poet to finish and start the next phrase and on and on till everyone was too drunk to write any more poetry.
something about those long scrolls always reminded me of film and I woner if they don’t hold a key to a collaborative online cinema where in the audience builds the illusion from it’s own reality.
This concept I generally refer to as Levithan, or the white whale out of Hobbes where the many become one (Eplurbious Unum)
I’m wondering if there will be one little fat girl in Iowa, or a whole gaggle of fat girls all over the world getting together to do some thing genius?
I don’t know, what do you think a linked film would be?
April 2nd, 2007 at 4:14 pm
a person I was chatting w/ at a party recently said that the shows would be sponsored like in the old days of tv, where the whole show was covered by one sponsor.
besides that I like what you did w/ the butterfly and kimono, and enjoying your blog as usual.
April 2nd, 2007 at 4:15 pm
oh! while it’s still free, that is.