Thursday, February 24, 2011

Anyone can't do it.


It used to be if you wanted to shoot a movie or print a poster or, even, take a picture, you used to have to know a lot of stuff.

If you were printing a poster, you had to have had some training in type. You'd have to know about fonts and leading and other stuff.

Most of these skills were crafts and took time and money to master. So, if you weren't really serious about the craft you dropped off along the way. Maybe you took up ping-pong or something. You decided printing wasn't for you.

Today, any fool with a camera and a Mac can make a movie and usually does. Worse, some of these fools with cameras and Macs are good salespeople. So they go to clients and say, "Why pay "X" for a web video, I can shoot the same thing for 80 cents." Often clients believe that blather and take the bait.

I'll be really blunt about this. 99.999% of everything that's shot is crap. For every video on YouTube that goes viral there are 27 of a dimwitted college student playing Stanley Kowalski for some college drama class. Crap.

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of production is fat and bloated. And costs can probably be cut. But a lot of costs come in the form of insurance that you, the client, aren't going to get absolute garbage--or if your concept is absolute garbage at least it will be good-looking, well-produced garbage.

This is the era of pundits proclaiming that anyone can make a movie, a commercial, can be a politician. No.

Anyone can't do it.

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