I am racing off to a shoot this morning so I will probably chime in a bit more later, but I have been very disturbed by so much in these threads. Before leaving, I wanted to note two things:
1) The repeated references to videoblogging as "the industry". 2) The reference in a recent podtech post to more content from "video pros". I have nothing - NOTHING - against people making money, or people making GOOD money, from videoblogging, or any other media activity. I would be a hypocrite otherwise: while I am not what one would call a commercial filmmaker or musician based on what I produce, my living is made in those worlds, some of if directly or indirectly from my own work, and while I continue to eschew advertising (I *might* feel differently if I got to pick who the advertisers were), I am all for artists, entertainers, and alternative media people making a living at it if they want to. I also shiver at the words "talent" and "content", but the people placed in those categories by those holding the pursestrings have been at the bottom of the food chain for way way way way way too long. The relationships need to move from the parasitic to the symbiotic side of the scale. But if media companies succeed in narrowing the general perception of "videoblogging" down to an "industry" of "pros", the potential of this revolutionary medium to do so many things for so many - opening up new channels of expression for the previously unheard, the development of communities based on new forms of communication, the advancement of the art of the moving image and its language, and perhaps most importantly the breaking down of the stifling, narrow, suffocatingly dull range of media options and opportunities economically dictated in their mania for predictable financial outcomes by old media, by the high-finance side of the art world, and by the now star-driven field of "independent" film - will be lost. (oh, and apparently the need to create run on sentences like the one above ;-) I don't want to have to find another word besides "videoblogging" to describe that side of what I do, but much of the recent dialog makes me worry that I will soon have to. A couple of other things: 3) Blip is indeed a wonderful model of what businesses in this new world can be. 4) Irina, who I have never met, seems to be a force of nature in this community - the good kind - and I hope in the long term this opens up more opportunities for her. 5) I remain optimistic about the potential for this medium. I want to be clear - this is not an anti-moneymaking rant. But please please please lets keep videoblogging from going down the road indie film went: becoming a slightly edgier copycat of the same world it hoped to be an alternative to. Sure there's room for blatantly commercial and old-media-like work, but let's keep the term, the field, the form, viably and visibly open, so that new voices, new possibiities, and alternative and groundbreaking work - in whatever form they take - are the point rather than the exceptions. Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
