The Low End and The High End

There's an interesting story over at COOL HUNTING, Artist and Theatrical Director Robert Wilson has created a series of Video Portraints he has titled called Voom Portraits, they are of a range of celebrity figures such as Winona Ryder, Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jnr. To create the video portraits each candidate and to sit quite still and think about nothing. As the technology such as DVD, Video and Flat LCD and Plasma Screens becomes cheaper and more widespread, will it become common place to have a a short film of a loved on playing on the wall, or images that change through out the day, like a scene out of a Star Wars film. As digital media progresses and become more mainstream we are definately seeing a proliferation of content creation that is reminicent of times past. The mass blog posts and viral jokes of YouTube feel like the home video explosion of the 1980's, while the increase of experimental film and film art is reminicent of a decade or two earlier. Shortly after reading about Robert Wilson's Voom Portraits a colleague emailed me, and everyone else in the office, a video of babbies vommiting on their parents, naturally half the office were abhored and the other half had to take some 'sick minutes'. The juxtaposition of the two reminded me of this recent post that proclaims The Warshaw Curve. Doug Warshaw co-founder of video editing and sharing site MotionBox noted that since the rise of online digital media has taken hold the viewership. We are increasingly more likely to watch specialised content - which is begging to lead to a downfall of generic mass market broadcasting, things like the local nightly news. The hugely successful British Comedy show, 'Little Britain' demonstrates the 'Warshaw Curve' very effectively, each episode a man walks into a shop, the shop's specialisation differs from week to week, the man asks for a very particular item, like a book about knitting from 1923 that is exactly 182 pages long or a board game about dragons suitable for 8-12 year olds. The Man behind the counter can find a 184 page book from 1922 or a dragon game suitable for 7-11 year olds but the client always wants the impossible. I think a good term to use to describe the future is 'superfragmetation', everybody is searching for exactly the thing they like, while many Content Producers at first got excited about The Long Tail as they hoped to re-sell and re-purpose all their previous creations, this situation may only be around for a limited period of time. If the generic creations continue to decrease, will their be a long tail to exploit in the future, or will all product start to become more globalised? During the Planning Sessions for Screenwest's Strategic Plan last year, one of the themes that was highlighted as Western Australia's strength is our unique location - nowhere on earth looks like the West Coast of Australia. However to make full use of this advantage, we really have to put effort into understanding storytelling from a global market perspective, Australian content with an Australian voice, looking at Universal themes for a global audience. As long as we remain in the mindset of Australian stories for Australian audiences we will continue to struggle and fall. What is becoming very clear is that the mid-range content in terms of value, budget and quality is the middle market area that looks likely to disapear and successful productions will be at one extreme or the other of the scale.