Can new technology provide opportunity for filmakers? Is James Jaeger correct in his assessment? (1 Viewer)

[JParker]

Jaeger states:

Daily Bell: Where does the industry go from here? Where do you go from here? James Jaeger: I think the movie industry is dead. The age of looking at shadows on a wall is over. The new entertainment age that's emerging is virtual reality, a "place" where one gets to not only LOOK at shadows but PLAY with them. Since the Lumiere brothers' projector popularized movies as mass entertainment around 1895 audiences have watched virtually every plot human beings can dream up in a given reality. James Cameron gave us a glimpse of the first movie that was believable and seamless 3D. My mentor, Lee Garmes, produced and directed the very first 3D movie ("Hannah Lee"), but that 3D didn't have computers and laser technology. Next are headset personal movie theaters and later the image will be painted directly onto the retina by lasers. Among these advances we will see photo-realistic actors, much better than the ones that first appeared in "Final Fantasy." Note the studios have suppressed this technology as they suppressed the technology of large cheap plasma screens. Why? It will put them out of business. Anyone in the movie business with even one (1) technically-oriented brain cell knows that competition (people like me) will soon be able to completely animate feature motion pictures with any set, location, vehicle, prop, special effect OR star we want for very modest budgets. We have already started this process on our "Ecospheres" project. When my mentor shot the first movie to use mazda lights (the forerunner to incandescent lights) on the set, when he shot the first 70mm widescreen feature ("The Big Fisherman") and produced the first feature shot entirely on videotape ("Why?"), some called him crazy prior to each accomplishment. Before Lee passed away, I interviewed him on some of this. There's a link to the interview on my page about Lee at Mecfilms.com... Daily Bell: Before we forget, update us further on Tesla. That's in the works as well. James Jaeger: Again, our Tesla film is called "TESLA - The Poet of Electricity" and its website is at www.PoetOfElectricity.com. The screenplay depicts the REAL story of Nikola Tesla, the story that explains how Thomas Edison and J. P. Morgan screwed Tesla. To this very day, you can bet Warner Bros. and the other studios do business with J. P. Morgan's banks and even Edison's company, General Electric, which incidentally owns RCA , hence NBC is a partner with Universal Studios. Whether Hollywood finances the TESLA project or not makes little difference. We will eventually produce it independently. One of the advantages of this is it will cost $50 million less. We won't have to hire a Ridley Scott to direct it and we won't have to pay studio overhead to a bunch of executives that just sit around and say "no." I would be glad to direct an independent production of TESLA, as I wrote the screenplay and who really knows the story and characters better? The Tesla Science Foundation, the largest Tesla Society in the world, has reviewed and endorsed the screenplay and assured me that there are at least 100 million scientists and fans around the world that are interested in, if not mad about, Nikola Tesla. Given a $5 ticket sale to 100 million people, that's $500 million to the independent production company that tells the studios to go f--k themselves. So hopefully, I will soon NOT be able to walk down even Hollywood Boulevard....

See: http://www.thedailybell.com/28545/James-Jaeger-on-Gun-Control-Nikola-Tesla-and-the-Inevitability-of-the-Internet-Reformation Notwithstanding his (political) views outside of the film industry, could he be correct? Is there an opportunity for a "people's cinema"? Could the studios go the way of the door-stopping Sunday Times? Does the CGI tech he describe exist, especially on a budget?

 

[Sam Posten]

Yep, it's here today and it's called Youtube, Vimeo and the like. Pretty cool stuff. If you want to SELL your product then look no further than iTunes, Google Play, and Netflix. Edit; Woops, Vimeo goes PPV just as we are discussing this: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/12/vimeo-on-demand/ It has never been more affordable to create a beautiful looking visual product. What is still expensive are compelling experiences, talent, raw human emotion, the elements of surprise and serendipity, and just plain old good storytelling. If you can get those together you can even crowd fund your vision to beautiful effect. 5 films at Sundance this year were crowdfunded at Kickstarter.com I expect that number to continue to rise dramatically. The CGI tools discussed have been around for 30 years. You know them better as Video Games. Interactive Fiction is HARD. We have not had our "Birth of a Nation" moment yet for this art form, or if we have we are too close to it to have recognized its achievement as it passed.