The impact of new technologies on my production

Initially I did some research on how changing technologies have impacted the film industry, as this would obviously be relevant to my production. Key theorists I found interesting and relevant were as follows:

“A new generation of UK media power players are ditching the traditional gatekeepers and going straight to their audience via the web” (Plunkett 2008).

I found this interesting as it reflects my generation and the technologies I have had available to me my whole life. In terms of my production, this is most relevant to the distribution stage because obviously I can utilise youtube to reach a mass international audience - something film makers fifteen years ago would not have been able to do (exhibition was limited to cinema screenings, VHS and DVD). This research led me to look at David Gauntlett (2007), who stated the following:

“The view that the internet and new digital media as an optional extra is replaced with the recognition that they have fundamentally changed the ways we engage with all media.”

Effectively, this means that the whole media industry has changed because of the internet and there is now a blurring between audiences and producers like never before because anybody who owns a computer and a camera can be a producer. I find this concept extremely exciting because it means my product (trailer) can actually reach a real audience.

The internet also allowed me to reach more people in my potential target audience when conducting surveys, through the use of Surveymonkey and Facebook. This is a more sophisticated method of collecting data for audience profiling because my target audience consists of people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, who are also the primary users of the internet and social networking sites and therefore are more likely to take part in a survey found on this medium, as Toby Miller (2006) and Tapscott and Williams (2006) state:

“By looking at how culture is used and transformed by social groups, cultural studies see people not simply as consumers, but as potential producers of new social values and cultural language."

“As people individually and collectively progress the web, they’re increasingly in command…this is the new consumer power. It’s not the ability to sawp suppliers at the click of a mouse…It’s the power to become the supplier – in effect to become an economic power themselves.”

In terms of Miller, these new forms of media (MySpace, Facebook, etc) are classic examples of the consumers switching roles to become the producers and, as Miller says, ‘potential producers of new social values and cultural language’. In terms of my production, it means that are able to put input into the social values and cultural language of my production.

Regarding Tapscott and Williams, it is important to remember that it is not solely the web that provides this power (though it is critical in terms of exhibition and reaching wider audiences) it is also advances in editing software, digital cameras, etc that narrows the gap and makes the transition from consumer to producer possible.

A good example of this would be when the hit US TV series 'House' was filmed entirely with a Cannon D7 - a camera completely accessible to amateurs.

http://www.petapixel.com/2010/04/09/house-season-finale-filmed-entirely-with-canon-5d-mark-ii/

I will utilise this technology in my own productions as I will film my trailer using the D7's slightly cheaper baby brother, the Cannon 600, which is capable of shooting high-quality HD film.

In terms of editing, I will use final cut pro, iMovie and after-effects to achieve industry standard special effects and titles - this is something film makers (fifteen years ago) would not have been able to do so easily because the software had not been developed and the software available would have been far out of the price range of low budget film makers like myself.

In short, as Gauntless (2007) states;

“Conventional research methods are replaced—or at least supplemented by new methods which recognise and make use of people's own creativity, and brush aside the outmoded notions of 'receiver' audiences and elite 'producers'".