Murphy's post centers around the film Four Eyed Monsters. The film's financial prospects looked dim going the festival route so the creators have posted the film on YouTube and, in general, use the Web as the primary promotional vehicle.
Murphy's complaints are that YouTube generates no direct income and that time spent trying to promote the film via various social networking sites is time not spent being creative on another project. I'll have to let the art v. commerce issue be one that the filmmakers deal with since I'm merely a consumer. However, reading Murphy's comments made me question just who would want to sit in front of a computer screen and watch a feature film in a small box and of mediocre video & audio quality. The Dulcinea recently bought a video iPod and I put some episodes of LOST on it for her both because she hasn't seen any of last season and as an experiment, of sorts. Watching it to make sure my work had paid off, I was struck by how uninspiring and unsatisfactory it is to watch the program on such a small screen. Perhaps this is because I'm spoiled as I was able to watch most of last season in high definition on a 52" TV. Still, I must wonder if we're so desperate to watch moving pictures that we will accept even the smallest screen sizes and the lowest acceptable quality. If I had an hour-long commute each morning sitting on a train or bus, watching an iPod might be fun but I don't and I can't see myself sitting in a coffee shop staring at such a tiny screen.
Murphy says, "My point is simply that people are not going to attend screenings, rent films, or buy DVDs when the work is already available for free on YouTube." I would hazard a guess and say that this certainly applies to many people, though not all. All quibbling over numbers aside, the comment also illustrates the double-edged nature of the Net and things like iPods. The Internet surely delivers quantity but is quality being sacrificed? Would the majority of people rather watch a movie on YouTube for free than pay to see it in a theatre or watch it on DVD?
I know a couple people who, like me, are fans of Doctor Who and who download the show rather than wait a few months for it to be shown on PBS or the Sci-Fi Channel. The two people I'm thinking of immediately download the most recent episode when it's available which means they download files that are 350-375MB. On the other hand, I wait a few more hours to begin the much lengthier process of downloading the episode as a 1.5GB file. Does this make me a snob and/or old fashioned? Sometimes I wonder if music is being cheapened. I mean, if your audience is increasingly going to buy a single song instead of an album and in a lossy compression format where certain frequencies (usually on the high end) are lost and then listen to it with earbuds that can't reproduce much bass, are you as a musician going to stop caring about making a quality recordings because no one will notice anyway?
Professor Murphy's concern in his post is compensation. For me, I have to wonder, if you're a filmmaker and you know a major venue for your work will be a tiny portion of a computer screen or some kind of portable media player, how, if at all, will that influence how you make your films?
Here is Four Eyed Monsters:
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