Viral Loop

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Viral Loop Page 12

by ADAM L PENENBERG


  After the company was rebranded MSN Hotmail, it grew to 30 million registered users within eighteen months of launch. Over the course of the decade, Hotmail continued to increase its ranks of users, counting more than 260 million registrants; at one point, one in four people on the Internet maintained a Hotmail address. Microsoft removed the viral tag and replaced it with simple advertising, which irritated many users but didn’t lead them to quit en masse. In 2005 Hotmail was folded into Windows Live and continues to be one of the three most popular webmail programs in the world, along with Yahoo and Gmail.

  5

  When the Audience Decides What’s Good

  Collective Curation; Boom, Bust, and Beyond, and the Viral Reality Show of Your Life

  The great digital push is under way. We live in an age when the tools of self-expression have never been more accessible. Stripped-down technology with ever-greater capabilities—lighter, simpler cameras, for instance—let just about anyone shoot, edit, and post videos and photos on the Web. Broadband allows webizens to consume it instantly, and when users decide something is good, they share it with their network of friends via email, by embedding a link in their blog, or by posting on a discussion thread. Without gatekeepers to filter content, the audience attains a power never before seen, exemplified in the experiences of one Arin Crumley, a tall, Twizzler-thin videographer living in Brooklyn, New York.

  His story begins like many of his peers, with the twenty-one-year-old Crumley trawling for a girlfriend on the Internet, blasting notes to more than one hundred likely prospects who posted personals on Time Out New York’s website. Shortly afterward, Susan Buice, a young, self-styled “artist in theory, waitress in practice,” clicked open his email: “What made you move to NY? Do you have any more pix? I think I might find you hot.”

  Unlike the others on Crumley’s hit list, Buice decided to give him a chance. She told him to drop by the restaurant where she worked the late-night shift. Crumley showed up, ready to shock, disguised in sunglasses and baseball cap, packing a video camera, and snapping surreptitious candids, then trailing her as she left the restaurant for the subway. “Dear Stalker,” Buice replied, after the photos arrived in her in-box. “So this is what the world sees. Just an innocent bystander. So pedestrian. Nothing like the tragic hero I feel as I trudge through each day.” She told him the typical date wouldn’t do justice to the stalking experience. “We need to think of another unique scenario—something challenging.” Channeling his inner mime, he suggested they avoid small talk by communicating without speaking. For their first date, they silently wandered the Brooklyn waterfront, passing notes, drawing pictures, listening to music on each other’s iPods. Later, when Buice attended an artist colony in Vermont, they mailed videos back and forth; six months after they first met, they moved in together (they lifted the no-talking edict). Along the way, they amassed a collection of artifacts most couples would call “keepsakes.” Buice and Crumley considered them artistic “by-products.”

  Eventually, in the way of youth the world over, they concluded that their courtship had to be immortalized and only a full-length feature film would suffice. They quit their jobs, pooled $10,000 in savings, lined up a stack of credit cards, and flew in a friend from the Left Coast to operate their prized possession: a Panasonic DVX100 digital video camera. The saga of Four Eyed Monsters, their self-directed, self-obsessed movie, had begun.

  It was an unlikely way to make a movie, and if it sounds self-indulgent and a tad meta, well, it was. But there was method to their madness. Until recently, making a movie meant using a shaky Super 8 or low-resolution camcorder, or taking a flier that required tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of personnel, and superior technical expertise. It also meant dueling with the studio executives and distributors who decided which movies made it into theaters and which didn’t, and who exerted ham-fisted control over the industry, making it all but impossible for neophytes like Buice and Crumley to break through. (And even if they did, they were often roundly fleeced: bought off with a nominal take-it-or-leave-it offer, stripped of control of their work, and sent packing back to Mom.) Now the same pair of lovelorn kids who would have vanished completely in another age can pick up a camera, teach themselves the art of filmmaking for next to nothing, and make a commercial-quality movie. They might even hit it big.

  Of course, digital movies are not new. More than a decade ago, Love God, long since forgotten, was one of the first—if not the first—independent film entirely shot and edited in digital video. Back then, the format was merely a curiosity; now, with the price of a decent camera dipping below $3,000 and quality steadily improving, digital is reshaping entertainment the way the talkies did eighty years ago, with similarly revolutionary effects. Even the notion of a “film” has begun to seem a little quaint: sure, there are still your standard ninety-odd-minute narratives, and they might be around forever, but because moving images are increasingly being viewed in and over a variety of venues and devices—from 3-D high-definition digital theaters to TVs to laptops to PDAs, cell phones, iPods, and everything in between—even that form is morphing and the ninety-minute canvas that has characterized movies for the past eighty years might change. A film today might be a series of three- to five-minute episodes or a twenty-minute short. The Beastie Boys handed out fifty hi8 videocams so that fans could capture them in concert (the band later returned them for a refund). For $164,000, South African director Aryan Kaganof created SMS Sugar Man, the first feature-length movie shot entirely on cell phone cameras. Independent filmmaking is thriving in places as far-flung as Iran, Jordan, and Malaysia, and here in the States, partly because the tools of the trade are increasingly affordable. And it’s not just indies. Mel Gibson shot Apocalypto in digital, Michael Mann used it for scenes in Miami Vice, and television has been dominated by digital video for years.

  As a practical matter, it opens up other opportunities as well. Not only is it cheap (35-millimeter film costs about two hundred times more than digital tape), it’s lightweight, simple, and subtle. For documentary filmmakers the format lets them make movies they couldn’t do otherwise. James Longley, director of the Oscar-nominated Iraq in Fragments, used the same relatively compact Panasonic camera as Crumley and Buice. “Just imagine trying to shoot on 16-millimeter film stock during a three-hour Friday sermon, stuck in the middle of the Kufa Mosque in southern Iraq, sandwiched between seven thousand followers of Moqtada Sadr in 110-degree heat,” he says. “At a minimum, you would need a camera assistant to load and unload the eighteen film magazines and a soundman to record the audio. You would probably need lights as well, as the sun goes down.” With digital, however, he was able to capture the scene on three DV tapes, without the obtrusive camera crew, using a camera light enough that he could hold it for hours and not grow tired. Later he rode in the back of a pickup truck filled with Mahdi Army militia, recording everything as they arrested alcohol sellers in a local market, took them back to the Sadr office, and interrogated them. “A large part of being able to record that kind of material is the ability to be unobtrusive,” he says, “to let the mechanism of the camera nearly vanish, unencumbered by lights, sound recordists, and film-changing bags.”

  That doesn’t mean that everyone with a digital camera has talent. Ronald Steinman, executive editor of The Digital Filmmaker, says, “The typewriter didn’t make better writers. You can buy a digital camera, do digital editing on your laptop, but it doesn’t mean everyone who learns it will know how long a dissolve should last or where to cut. It’s one thing to have the equipment. It’s another to be able to use it.”

  [ OPEN WATER ]

  With billions of videos streamed online, it’s not surprising new businesses are sprouting up around this digital efflorescence. Each day on YouTube, millions of video views are delivered and thousands of clips are uploaded. Apple’s iTunes Music Store sold 12 million video clips for $1.99 in its first few months. These aggregators are fast becoming the central nodes of an entirely new video marketing and
distribution system, one far from Hollywood’s control, except for Hulu.com, the industry’s answer, which sells downloads of movies. Nevertheless, the big studios may increasingly find themselves competing with films made by the masses. Part of the issue is lowering the transaction cost for making and distributing programs and films, and part of it is the low cost of user-generated content (usually free). It’s completely disintermediating. That process of cutting out the middleman, while still in its infancy, has the potential to upend the balance of power that has governed the film industry for decades.

  One early indication that homespun digital could deliver Hollywood-worthy numbers was the 2003 release of Open Water, a psychothriller with a cast of two, a crew of three, and a pack of sharks. Chris Kentis, who had been cutting film trailers for a production company, pounded out a script, auditioned actors, bought two digital video cameras, and shot the movie over the course of two years, mostly on the open ocean. “We were chasing weather, and weather was chasing us,” Kentis says. “We could see a storm approaching with lightning, and the captain would tell us we had fifteen minutes to shoot the scene. We could react immediately. It was guerrilla filmmaking on the water.” With low expectations he submitted it to Sundance, figuring that festival organizers would take a dim view of a movie with so few credits (written by Chris Kentis, directed by Chris Kentis, cinematography by Chris Kentis…). Not only was Open Water accepted, it attracted a distribution deal from Lion’s Gate and, later that year, opened at 2,700 theaters across the country. Made for $130,000, it grossed $30 million at the domestic box office and close to $100 million worldwide (counting DVD sales).

  In the time since Open Water debuted, the technology has improved at a fierce rate, and this is helping to mitigate the risks often associated with filmmaking—namely, big budgets coupled with unpredictable returns on investment. This was the thinking behind Samaritan, a short movie produced by Star Circle Pictures, about a mysterious stranger who thwarts an armed robbery, and a police detective who is left with more questions than answers. Every time you say the word “film” on the set of a Star Circle Pictures project, you have to fine yourself 25 cents. That’s because the company doesn’t “film” movies. It doesn’t even use digital video, which it views as so last year. It made the world’s first micro movie with the Panasonic AG-HVX200 high-definition camera, using memory cards. Producer Ethan Marten says they wanted to show investors how much cheaper and efficient it was to create movies in the newer formats. A typical director shoots five or six setups a day. Samaritan’s director Kimball Carr was able to do eighty-one over the course of two nights with a crew of ten in what he called “controlled insanity.”

  Part of the efficiency stemmed from preplanning. Carr storyboarded the entire movie in advance with animated characters with Innovative Software’s FrameForge 3D Studio software. This enabled him to display each scene—every camera angle and character nuance—to the cast and crew before shooting. (In the future, a director could animate an entire production instead of tucking a spec script under his arm to show potential investors.) They switched between handheld shots, shoulder shots, and tripod mounts with the same camera, which made it easy for the crew to anticipate what the director needed, and deployed three computers on the set. One had the script, the other the animated storyboards, and a third collected the data from two 4-gigabyte memory cards, which meant they could shoot sixteen straight minutes, download the data to the laptop, and reuse the cards.

  “We didn’t just have dailies,” Marten says. “We had instantaneous-nesses. Yet we also have our old film look. You’d have to be the equivalent of a wine connoisseur to tell the difference. Some actors and actresses are worried because you can pick up every imperfection, every crater in their faces.” He muses that in the future, a star’s agents might have to write degradation clauses into contracts, requiring directors to degrade close-ups because they are so crystal clear.

  At the outset, Buice and Crumley had little of Kentis’s skill or Star Circle’s technology. For starters, they had no idea how to frame a shot or do basic cinematography. Their cameraman wasn’t familiar with the camera. They had never acted before. After each shoot, they beamed the dailies on a wall of their cramped loft and edited footage on a Mac G5 computer with Final Cut Pro software. “Sometimes we ended up shooting and re-shooting a scene four or five times before we got it right,” Crumley says.

  Then, a year into the project, with our young heroes maxed out on seven credit cards, Four Eyed Monsters was accepted into Slamdance, the rogue sidekick to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. That led to invitations to other festivals—eighteen in all, including South by Southwest, the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, and Gen Art. Along the way, the pair collected several awards and glowing reviews. Variety called Four Eyed Monsters “fascinating,” a film that “deliberately smudges the line between nonfiction and invention.” The Boston Phoenix said it was “spry, brainy, endlessly inventive,” an “Annie Hall of the 25-year-old set.” Others described it as “exhilarating,” “accomplished and endearing,” a movie that contained “frantic vibrancy” and “delivers a powerful narrative punch.” It felt like the beginning of a Nora Ephron script that would, inevitably, end with Buice and Crumley better dressed, in a fabulous apartment, and very much in love.

  Alas, their whirlwind tour yielded nothing. After eighteen festivals, they were still without a distribution deal to get Four Eyed Monsters into theaters. Their work seemed to resonate, but they had no money and no access to the pipeline. All they had was a mounting sense that people liked the thing. “We had a film that nobody knew about and nobody wanted to distribute,” Crumley says. “Companies told us that the ‘target’ audience for our film was ‘hard to pin down.’ What they meant was that they had no tried-and-true formula for how to release a film to the type of audience our film appealed to, so they didn’t want to take a risk.”

  Which got them thinking. At the time, MySpace had about 75 million members. Children of the Web that they were, Buice and Crumley understood that social networking sites could generate interest and create buzz, a free, self-fulfilling wave of publicity with a veritable army of users, the vast majority under thirty, marketing their movie for them virally by blogging about it or posting video clips. As any ad person will tell you, that kind of lightning-fast word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, and the Internet’s viral plain makes it possible on a scale never before seen. So Buice and Crumley embraced what Crumley calls “collective curation,” the idea that a loyal, intimate, motivated fan base is better able to judge quality than any individual and a thumbs-up from the “net-geist” can be life-changing.

  It was here that Buice and Crumley began butting up against the film establishment and the Web became a transformative vehicle for independent filmmakers looking to crash the gates of the old system.

  [ BOOM, BUST, AND BEYOND ]

  All of this was made possible by the advent of a fast, efficient mode to disseminate content, which arose from a deep, almost perilous crash, a cycle of failure that created the world we live in today. The pattern starts with a new technology that is greeted by equal parts ardor and ire. As the past two centuries have shown, great technological innovations—railroads, telegraph, telephone, electricity, cars, radios, the personal computer—first overcome skepticism, take root, then spin into a predictable cycle: entrepreneurs recognize a novel technology’s potential; newcomers rush into the market, drawing venture capital, which in turn spawns even more companies and investment. Because stock price in this phase is pegged to possibility, not revenue and profit, almost all the players do well, even though most, if not all, of the companies, bleed red. Some succeed spectacularly at this Ponzi-like scheme. Share prices shoot skyward in a speculative frenzy.

  Eventually, though, reality sets in. After burning through their cash, companies start to fold, leaving investors to wonder when and how someone will actually make money. Pessimism supplants enthusiasm. Stock prices crash and the eco
nomy tanks until, over time, the core technology is woven into the fabric of life and the market stabilizes. It’s a cycle of boom, bust, and sustained growth (a golden age, if you will), followed by decay when a better mousetrap comes along.

  Bubbles, however, don’t recur just because people have failed to learn from experience. They are a necessary stage of technological development. After railroads supplanted canals as the hot investment of the early nineteenth century, they followed essentially the same arc. According to Alasdair Nairn, author of Engines That Move Markets, between 1825 and 1826 about as many railroads were founded as had been started in the previous twenty years. And when the market crashed, it crashed hard. By the mid-1870s, 40 percent of American railway bonds were in default and bankruptcies surged. But the bubble wasn’t for naught. Before the crash, 45,000 miles of track had been laid; by 1900, there was a national network more than 200,000 miles long, and this made it possible for the United States to grow and prosper from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Similarly, the later rise of the automobile spurred the development of the American highway system, which ate much of the railroads’ freight business but served to populate the entire country.

  Capacity, or rather, overcapacity, is the key to progress. For us, broadband is the new railroad, the new highway system, the new electricity. Electricity spawned entire new industries as consumers chocked their homes full of appliances that simply did not exist before power companies flipped the switch. Telephone companies, many of them small regional operations, unfurled a skein of cable that connected people around the country—and the world. Trucks and railroads revolutionized shipping and transportation. Even the recent mortgage crisis and corresponding real estate boom and bust offer a glimmer of good news in a sea of bad. All that cheap money made it possible for Americans of all stripes to finance the purchase of homes and college educations when in the past they largely were shut out of credit markets. The same dynamic is at work with high-speed Internet access. After all those years of laying fiber-optic cable, DSL, and other high-speed lines, we have created huge stores of capacity, and they make all sorts of innovations possible.

 

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