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When you post a film on a social media platform or a video streaming platform do you ever doubt you made a great film? or did you just make a cool video that just happens to work with the algorithm on that platform?
The Digital Age has been great for democratising filmmaking and making it a more approachable art form to pursue as long as you have a camera, a story and a place to show your films to an audience. We have phones with cameras that shoot in HD, stories are all around us in the news, books, other films and especially our imaginations. Social media provides us a place to show our films for free and learn as we go. It's a powerful tool, to say the least.
Filmmaking at its core, is not content. It can be classified in any number of ways but content doesn't quite sit right. As a director myself, finding a way to draw the invisible line between content and filmmaking is gradually becoming harder to do.
What makes filmmaking different? What is content? The word ‘Content’ was used to define the contents of something. But now? That word's taken on a whole different meaning. As filmmakers, how do we draw the line in our works? Is it just in our heads? or are we missing something?
The value of a film before the digital age was it brought people to the cinemas. The excitement of being entertained by a great movie with your friends or family enjoying a ‘picture’ as movies used to be called was a culture in its own way. There was this excitement and adventure to it all. But these days that feeling, that experience seems to have dissipated. The introduction of streaming has only helped that along. With social media being ground zero for every aspiring filmmaker looking to break in, there might come a time when you as a filmmaker make films that do well on social media with the reasoning that because it did well on social media and your film was able to retain the ever-shrinking attention span of “audiences” on social media, instead of making films the way you want to. Not what's popular but what you feel is honest and true to yourself as an artist.
We are filmmakers. Not Garbage collectors. Words from the esteemed Werner Herzog.
Films don't start fast, they don't start slow. They start the way they're meant to. Not with some catchy hook or clickbait title. Some films will demand your attention instead of pandering to your attention span needs. That's what storytelling is all about. That's what filmmaking is about.
Just my thoughts. What do you think?
Long Live Cinema.