Death of corporate media, film at 11
I mentioned last week that I thought TV would hold up against the "DIY" juggernaught, but I could be wrong - there's a lot of extra cost mentioned above. How much do you really need, if you just want to capture a scene, and are willing to use actors who don't have egos the size of Montana?
I don't know the answer - I suspect know one does, yet - but there are tons of amateur and semi-pro actors around - many of them are doing part time local theater. Would they be willing to do full-time drama for a lot less than the cost for (insert star here)? I expect the answer is yes.
The only problem I see with this thesis is the assumption that the part-time actor will continue to do full-time drama for low cost and not see this as their big break. Quite often the enormous ego is already fully formed and what is sought is the chance to justify it. There are already some pretty damn big egos in the boogersphere, many of which have this same sort of arrogance. They remind me of the same sort of prima donnas I used to see in the media business; it's just the meristocrats don't (yet) have the job from which they can wield the arrogance. I think it also points out a problem with user-whatever-citizen-content-it-is-this-week: the cognitive dissonance between the pure meritocracy canard and the fact that many of the loudest "populist" voices have used the whateversphere as a sort of minor-leagues for big media. Look at the increasingly slicker production values we're seeing in vlogging and podcasting. The main difference between todays 'DIY' culture and earlier examples such as zines, for instance, is that I don't remember there being such a careerist aspect to zines - the idea wasn't to garner enough attention to attract major media attention, the idea was to stay outside the corporate media world. There is an embarrasingly venal self-consciousness you see in online media. Make magazine, from a big corporate publisher, mars good project ideas with cutesey branding ("Makers") and boingboing-esque self-congratulation. Most of the blogosphere, with some notable exceptions, wants that zine smell and those media bucks.