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Future of Cinematography! What’s next?


Saikat Chattopadhyay

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As the technology gets glitzier and more amazing the film industry shouldn't get ruffled by it. In fact, it might be wise to start walking in the opposite direction. You might get more notice. Don't bother trying to turn cinema into some kind of gaming/cinema/VR blend. It won't work. Gamers will always prefer their games and their VR; and you will lose audiences for traditional cinema. Cinema is what it is. A lot of people think it is evolving. It's not. It will die away if it does that. Because it won't be cinema anymore.

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3 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

I do happen to like things like the screen curtain rolling back, and a pianist or organist playing at the start, and things like that. I like the traditional cinema experience. And you know what, I think a lot of other people do too.

To me, that's the real trick. 

Can it be a real "show" ya know? 

More than just a normal movie. 

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3 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

I also feel a lot of people are bored with what Hollywood churns out now.

I use to watch 5 new movies a month easily and not that long ago. I remember riding my motorcycle home from work and catching the 7:30 of whatever came out pretty much every Friday night and doing mid day shows on the weekends. I lived at Arclight Hollywood and Sherman Oaks. Then things started to change with digital. The magic of the experience was just lost somehow. I stopped caring as much because where the movies were still good into the digital age, I just felt waiting 3 months for the video release, was worth it.

I think the problem is that most of the good stories, are being made into streaming services shows. The studios are spending so much time making that, they aren't really spending any time focused on movies. What they need to do is buy films again, they need to just be distributors and focus on internal production being for streaming. Then they can buy the stuff they put in the theaters, which would dramatically change the market. There is nearly no market for indy films right now, but if the studios were buying them and putting their money behind them, maybe we could see a wave of more creative and interesting movies hitting the theaters, not just the same ol' fodder.

With Disney faulting financially, with Apple interested in buying some part of Disney, I wonder what that may change things a bit.

But in the end, we just have so few studios willing to risk the cost of theatrical, they go "all in" and those films are junk because it's scary for them to be anything but a star shaped cookie cutter. Where I do love star shaped sugar cookies, especially when they're brown on the edges, I'd get bored soon enough.

Now I'm watching 5 new movies in the theater a year, maybe even less since covid. I do enjoy Quentin's theater. I do enjoy the American Cinematheque. They really only play older films and sometimes the best ones are very random times I can't attend. So it can be tricky to navigate. The repertory theaters are the only ones appearing to make money because they have such a low overhead. The big cineplexes are dying on the vine, surviving on popcorn and soda. They're basically food repositories rather than places of entertainment and it's sad. Seeing my favorite theaters close during covid, was also bad. 

As I like to say, whatever doesn't work in Hollywood, certainly won't work anywhere else and I see cineplexes dying fast. 

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At the moment, Hollywood has got three major problems:

a) The unstable worldwide situation: In the past, you would have been able to calculate with a worldwide release. Now, you cannot predict anything anymore (inflation, war in Europe, some governments still trying to fight Covid-19 with putting whole towns under quarantine,…)

b) Cinema isn’t on the top of the food chain in the entertainment industry anymore. So, in order not to make losses, the studios focus on boring mainstream stuff, sequels, prequels, spin-offs, … . This is killing a lot of creativity.

c) „Wokeness“ and other useless „political correctness“ stuff: For example, instead of doing another Western, the studios decided to replace the I-words with Smurfs and North-America of the past with a sci-fi-setting on a different planet. … and even more creativity got killed.

The result of this are movies like the latest avatar - low budget and designed to also work fine on small screens & another sequel/spin-off & politically correct.

 

But that’s only the present situation in Hollywood and will not help you predicting the future.

A future that one is yearning for is something like the French „Nouvelle Vague“ - creative, independent movies shot outside of studios by small crews - with a budget that is so small that they would even make profit when only being released „regionally“. Of course, this will only work without stars getting bazillions of dollars for each movie and without studios that also have to finance their „overhead“ (CEOs, marketing department, …). So maybe you should watch „A Bout de Suffle“ and some documentaries about Godard‘s way of working? Then take a look at the last ten minutes of the latest Hollywood productions (aka credits) and think about  how many people really have to work on a great movie. You might also watch „The Baldlands“ and the way the film got financed:

 

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To me it seems that in some weird way, digital cinematography , modern technology like drones and brushless gimbals, and led lighting techniques have managed to ruin the film industry for the most part. It sounds weird yes but somehow making too high performance technology which is too easy to use makes people stop caring about the end product anymore and to take shortcuts which make lots of practical sense but lead to the end product being lazily made and mediocre. 

Not in every production of course but it is insanely common nowadays to take these shortcuts because they make lots of practical sense and help save the budget and make the life of the crew easier (which leads it becoming the common norm very quickly).

I make these 'easy and lazy decisions' too and often hate the end result. Get the job done with limited resources but the artform suffers I think and this same stuff plagues the whole industry nowadays, often making "real movies" indistinquishable from mid budget tv series.

So the thing which will kill cinema will be the mediocrity. That is what we should fight against I think. 

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6 minutes ago, aapo lettinen said:

To me it seems that in some weird way, digital cinematography , modern technology like drones and brushless gimbals, and led lighting techniques have managed to ruin the film industry for the most part. It sounds weird yes but somehow making too high performance technology which is too easy to use makes people stop caring about the end product

I agree. But we cannot put the cat back into the bag. Photography is slightly more boring now precisely because everything is so easy and so cheap. People say that cameras don't take photos, but that's bullshit, because they do a lot of the work for us now. That's just the way it is.

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