The new printing press
When digital video met creator culture
Growing up in the 1980s, I always wanted to be a writer. Then I saw Star Wars and decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. As I soon found out, being a teenage filmmaker in the 1990s was close to impossible.
Then the millennium hit, we discovered the internet and everything went digital.
Welcome to analogue hell
The 90s were a dark time for the wannabe, indie, no-budget filmmaker. It’s a challenge now to remember how difficult it was to make a movie back then. It’s even harder to imagine for anybody who hit their teenage years in the 2ks.
Before getting into what we did have in the 90s, let’s consider what we didn’t have. For the amateur or micro-budget filmmaker it was a challenging time.
No non-linear editing. Instead, we had to connect up two VCRs (remember those?). YouTube and Vimeo didn’t exist. Wanted people to see your movie? Your only option was your immediate friends and family. No broadband internet yet. The internet was still a nascent, undisciplined thing: sharing video online simply wasn’t an option. High definition video resolutions? Non-professional cameras couldn’t even manage full standard definition. Digital storage was still primitive. Everybody was recording to videotape, a linear format prone to degredation. This also meant no digitally-accurate duplication. Twitter and Facebook. Online culture was in its infancy, found mostly on Usenet groups and a far cry from being mainstream. Mobile phones. Phones existed but not everybody had one. They certainly didn’t feature high quality video cameras.
Filmmaking wasn’t something you could accidentally discover in the 90s: you had to fully invest. I could go on, but you get the point.
A new millennium
The year 2000 was a mass of anticipation; a self-propelling hype train that got everybody excited about nothing in particular. In retrospect, for me, the turn of the millenium primarily marks the start of a new filmmaking age.
In the professional world digital was creeping in everywhere. CGI was commonplace in visual effects, though it had many years still to go before reaching a decent level of quality. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? had made history by being the first movie to be entirely colour timed digitally. The Phantom Menace had jumped about five years ahead of its time to bring new technologies to high end filmmaking, notably being one of the first tentative tests of digital cameras. A year later Attack of the Clones was shot all-digital and, while the overall quality of the film is highly debatable, it’s nevertheless a crucial milestone.
Independent, low-budget, home filmmaking on a computer was a reality
More importantly, as far as this article is concerned, digital, non-linear editing had trickled down to consumers. Independent, low-budget, home filmmaking on a computer was a reality — albeit an awkward, expensive one.
The miniDV format had arrived, bringing with it a digital format (still tape-based) that could be relatively easily transferred to a computer and edited in a non-linear fashion. It was still early days — computers we only barely up to the task of handling standard def video back then — but it was a start.
Even though home filmmakers only just discovering digital editing, some were already forging ahead into visual effects. And while the 3D gaming explosion of the late-90s had pushed hardware forward, being able to run VFX software wasn’t a simple affair for many people working on micro-budgets.
But they gave it a go anyway. It didn’t hurt that the Star Wars prequels and The Matrix trilogy were happening at the same time, inspiring a new generation of people to explore filmmaking, just as the original Star Wars had done over 20 years previously.
the new NLE market represented something greater: creative freedom
Communities emerged, attracting a diverse demographic from those in their early teens dabbling with their first cameras to parents in their mid-30s discovering that they could, at last, create their own version of Star Wars.
It’s crucial at this point to remember that YouTube didn’t yet exist. There were no free online video sites. To show a video to somebody else on the internet required you having your own server, somewhere to host your videos. You needed to understand how to FTP files. You needed to know how to use codecs to compress your video so that it was small enough to upload and download on primitive 56k modems. None of this was standardised yet: MP4 and H264 hadn’t been released.
Basically, if you were doing video online in the early 2000s, let alone visual effects-based videos, you were hardcore.
The genre pioneers
That high technological barrier is probably why amateur filmmaking went hand-in-hand with genre material. Science fiction and fantasy ruled, because it was the geeks who figured this stuff out first, and those were the genres they liked.
Back then, if you gave a genre fan an NLE and a VFX tool, they’d go and make themselves a Star Wars fanfilm. This was no better represented than over at theforce.net, which at the time was riding high on prequel excitement (back when everybody was still trying to self-delude into liking them) and hosted a significant filmmaking sub-community. That community survives to this day, complete with annual lightsaber choreography contests.
The drop-out rate must have been astronomical
Doing anything with the tools available at the time was prohibitively difficult. The drop-out rate must have been astronomical. Anybody that made it through was likely to have not only serious skills but envious dedication.
The best amateur filmmakers of the time embraced the online feedback loop, observing criticism of their work and vastly improving with each release. It’s those filmmakers, who were there when it happened, on the crest of the wave, that are now ruling YouTube and being courted by Hollywood and the advertising industry.
Target: 2005
YouTube launched in 2005 and was unutterably awful. The general consensus among filmmakers, even amateur filmmakers, was to stay well away. YouTube was a venue for cat videos and pranks, nothing more.
Given YouTube’s lacklustre quality at launch, for the established online filmmaking community, which had battled through the wild frontier and figured out the complexities of codecs, encoding, hosting and FTPing, there was genuinely no reason to use this new service, even if it was free. For many it was a slap in the face to all the effort they’d invested figuring things out the hard way (this is an attitude that pops up surprisingly often among no-budget filmmakers — the need the justify the time and effort given up to an all-consuming hobby).
It wasn’t evident immediately but YouTube (and its imitators) would go on to fundamentally change the way video is consumed. That change would be to the benefit of indie filmmakers, especially short filmmakers, but it would also shake up the established television and advertising industries.
The Gutenberg moment
To boil YouTube down to its most fundamental aspect is to realise that it’s the video equivalent of the printing press. Back when the 15th century printing press appeared, only a handful of people could write and even fewer people could produce material that could be distributed. The printing press made it suddenly possible to mass produce the written word, even if it took a while to work out the kinks.
That invention led directly to the explosion of writing ability over the ensuing centuries, as people realised the power of the written word to communication and share information.
Before YouTube, hardly anybody could make videos, or films. From the birth of cinema until the 1980s it required access to a film camera, film stock and all the associated tech and skill required to successfully light and process it. Anything above super 8 started to get expensive fast.
Before YouTube, hardly anybody could make videos
1980s brought in video cameras, which were universally terrible. That state of affairs lasted for 20 years. Camcorders got cheaper and slightly better but were still inherently only really suitable for holiday videos.
Fast forward to 2005 and HD camera exist. Still fairly new and expensive, but they’d arrived. High quality SD video cameras were easy to use and affordable. And YouTube had arrived, becoming the catalyst for a creative and technological explosion.
Unexpectedly, everybody could now shoot pretty decent video, edit their videos digitally, and then share the results with the entire world for free.
It started a cascade of technology, accessibility and skill.
21st century realities
Here we are, in 2014, with a video and filmmaking landscape that would be entirely foreign to anybody observing from even 10 years ago, let alone any further back into the past.
Almost everybody has a high definition video camera. You don’t even need a specialised video camera (although it helps), because every smartphone includes an HD video camera. For the first time in history, everybody has the ability to shoot video — it’s already revolutionised journalism and evidence gathering, but it’s going to have an enormous impact on filmmaking, too, when kids can start shooting from the moment they’re handed their first phone.
Anybody with a computer can enjoy non-linear editing. You don’t even have to pay for it — both Windows and Mac have free editing offerings, even if they’re currently a bit naff.
Visual effects are open to anybody who can dedicate the time to learning the techniques and knowledge required. That’s what I do now: I’m part of the team at FXHOME who design HitFilm, an affordable editor-compositor hybrid.
Most important of all is that every single person has access to a global audience.
The creator culture is impacting on all industries
Sure, money is still a factor. Particularly when it comes to marketing the finished product, but also when producing something. That will always be the case. But previously if you didn’t have much money that was it: you were out of options.
In 2014 you can shoot a video, in HD, and distribute it to the entire world, for free.
This is forging new careers. The creator culture is impacting on all industries — not just video and film — and new initiatives such as Kickstarter and Patreon are emerging all the time.
It’s the best time to be a creator
The next time you upload a video and are disappointed it only get 20,000 views, or a couple hundred, or maybe only 80, just remember that you only have to hop back 15 years to find a situation in which amateur and indie movies would only ever be seen by the creator’s immediate friends and family.
Now, indie short films are calling cards. YouTube and Vimeo are the filmmaker’s CV, more so than any parent-funded work experience on a BBC sitcom.
There’s never been a better time in human history to be the kind of person who just likes to make stuff.
