Crack Creative (http://www.crackcreative.com) developed a new production technology called "Virtual Production" for Avatar back in 2005. It allows directors to shoot CG motion capture characters and settings interactively like an actually location.
Crack Creative (http://www.crackcreative.com) developed a new production technology called "Virtual Production" for Avatar back in 2005. It allows directors to shoot CG motion capture characters and settings interactively like an actual location.
Stories and videos about the tech behind the making of Avatar would be far more HN-worthy than the mass-market trailer. The trailer is essentially just an ad/teaser/spoiler for a movie that will probably be as heavily promoted as Titanic.
The job of a distributer is by definition obsolete in the face of the internet. Most intelligent people I've met agree that fighting the ability to copy content has no future. Distributors may not be dead yet, but they are in the ER hooked up to monitors, with lawyers running around trying to defibrillate them with lawsuits.
For the most part they can't change either, because they are often under contract to provide content to certain channels and certain times. They can't just start offering a pay or advertising based torrent service. If they ever had that chance I think the window has closed.
In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...." or "hey everyone vote up our spec album"
In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...." or "hey everyone vote up our spec album"
That sounds more like a nightmare to me.
I've got a lot of friends who lack the ability to distribute themselves well. Actually, it's almost all my friends. Most musicians I know aren't good at publicity. In a scenario without effective distribution, the viral scene favors not the best work, but the most easily digestible work. That means a trend away towards complexity, which is not necessarily a trend I'd want to see.
Trent Reznor seems to be the flagship of this attitude of "a musician ought to do everything himself and publicize himself to death." That's great for him to say, but what about the people who can't do that as well as he can? I mean, NiN isn't particularly a brilliant band; it's good, but there's a lot better out there. Reznor is iconic not because he's the best but because he's the most savvy. Again: not certain that's a good thing. Not every talented person is good at promotion; we'd lose a lot of meaning for the sake of a lot of fluff. Distributors aren't a perfect solution, but they at least act as a sort of safegate. They do the work other people can't.
If I saw the opening 10 minutes of 2001 I wouldn't be excited. Ditto Blue Velvet and every Lynch film, ditto most Coen brothers films, ditto pretty much every movie I love that isn't made by Edgar Wright. You're asking people to judge a book by its cover, and that's not exactly fair.
The crowd sucks. The crowd is stupid. Look at Shirky's recent article about #amazonfail. Individuals become stupid when they become part of a mass. That's why the best producers and distributors tend to work alone or in small groups: because crowdsourcing doesn't work when it comes to finding good things. I don't trust even my handpicked Facebook friends to like good things, so I don't know why I'd trust the rest of the users on Facebook any more.
In a scenario without effective distribution, the viral scene favors not the best work, but the most easily digestible work.
Maybe. Do you suppose that's why there's so much more good music available now than there was 20 years ago, before we built the internet, as the most effective distribution mechanism in history?
The thing that I fear favors the most easily digestible work is the hair-trigger social voting sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, etc. But I think those depend on effective distribution, rather than being undercut by it.
Not every talented person is good at promotion;
Yeah, and that's a big part of why so many of them get ripped off by music-industry slime who are good at promotion. I for one am happy to be in an environment where fans can do the promotion these days.
I actually still have my Black Book. The definitive tome of hard core graphics programming. I'd still recommend it to anyone looking to dig deeper into high performance programming (graphics or otherwise).
The job of a distributer is by definition obsolete in the face of the internet. Most intelligent people I've met agree that fighting the ability to copy content has no future. Distributors may not be dead yet, but they are in the ER hooked up to monitors, with lawyers running around trying to defibrillate them with lawsuits.
For the most part they can't change either, because they are often under contract to provide content to certain channels and certain times, so they can't just start offering a pay or advertising based torrent service.
In terms of producing movies, music or other kinds of content, the only real value that remains in the studio model is financing. That is, someone pays to make your movie based on how excited you can make them in 10 minutes. With distribution being replaced, there may yet be a business model in production financing. Maybe "get enough people on facebook to like your script, and we'll give you 60 million dollars to make it...."
You only want to use it if you want a more robust payment then a 'buy now' button. In other words it's a lot to deal with if you only need that level of functionality. My app has a subscription model, and will be expanding out to a market at some point in the future. FPS handles all of those models. They also provide some good guarantees. Given some of the recent complaints about about google payments, and my own personal experiences with paypal I'm beginning to value these guarantees very highly.
However, my system is not fully implemented and deployed (hence no link yet), so I'm not ready to provide a full endorsement. I can only say that the experience so far on the development side has been very good, and the sandbox makes extensive testing before deployment very easy.
I will report back when I've deployed the system in production.
FPS provides a robust set of interface tools to the amazon payments system. It enables a number of payment models that other services don't offer such as, subscription, aggregate (i.e. micropayment), marketplace/3 party (i.e. user to user transactions with optional commission), and the prices are competitive. You can even do user to user transfers with no fees. They also offer fraud protection.
It is not trivial to implement in an application but does seem to be very concise for the features it provides. The con for this flexibility naturally is increased complexity. They do offer a 'Simple Pay' solution if you don't need the extra features, but I've not used that.
During development you can tie you application to the FPS 'sandbox' which simulates the complete user experience as well as virtual payments and fees so that you can see exactly how things will work in production from various points of view with out actually moving money around.
I needed subscriptions, so I could not use the other popular solutions (when the decision was made), and therefore can't compare. However, I refuse to use paypal because they put 100% of the risk on the account holder, while at the same time not disclosing information about the purchaser to allow for fraud investigation, this is flat out unacceptable.
Pace Camera (http://www.pacetech.com/) developed the 'fusion' 3d camera to film(HD) the live action parts http://www.nowpublic.com/3d_hd_fusion_camera_from_pace.