It’s funny how pleased I am that I face yet another high-profile opportunity to have people watch the content that I create for free.  Snagfilms.com is currently featuring Independent America: Rising from Ruins on its homepage, and will distribute it through a number of other channels, including Hulu and hopefully Netflix at some point (my first film “The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop” is already on Hulu, and is heading for iTunes).  Sure, you can still push for more money via a broadcast TV license, but at least as an indie filmmaker, those are getting harder to find, and they’re paying less.  So we content ourselves with the “digital pennies” as the “analog dollars” slip away, with the sheer hope that online, multiple-channel exposure leads to benefits in other ways (i.e. keep your day job, build your own personal brand).

The world of content — especially professional content — continues to shift beneath our feet.  Three years ago, I used my first class as a digital media professor at the University of Washington to understand just what I had produced with that first “amateur” film of mine (I had been a professional journalist, but I had never filmed my own feature-length documentary before).  The title of the class?  “Selling the Message: The Business of User-Generated Content.”  The “business” then, was under threat from pseudo-amateurs like me, with the explosion of digital media capture tools (aka, cheap cameras) and distribution platforms (aka, YouTube).  The established, institutional studio system seemed to be under attack as this proliferation in new “voices” transformed media into yet another commodity.

But interestingly, despite this commoditization, apparent amateurization, and the uncertainty of the economy, somehow the increased availability of media online has also produced more demand for “professional” content.  Witness Steve Jobs’ remarks this week as as he introduced Apple TV: Read more…

Loved this tongue in cheek article in the latest issue of Wired:

The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the “hero’s journey…”

Of course in my Storytelling & Digital Media class, we meet Joseph Campbell and Aristotle head-on, cos’ you need to know the “rules” before you can break them.  Many of my students reached for the stars with our latest exercise: shoot a 2-minute film with a beginning, middle and end (Aristotle), doing only in-camera edits.

Here is just some of our work (all of our films are up on our class social networking site, www.mcdmspace.ning.com). Read more…

According to Chris Kohler with Wired Magazine:

Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten told Next Generation this week that Microsoft will soon begin to delete some Xbox Live Arcade games from the service. The rationale is, to put it nicely, paper-thin: To “focus on quality over quantity” and “make it easier to find the games you are looking for.”

I am surprised by this in light of what I have studied about the long tail. It seems to make sense in the context of that theory, that once an item makes it into inventory, it just stays there. Why would they pull a title?

Read more…