One of the hardest parts about being a filmmaker used to be getting your work seen. For that, you had to find a platform and an audience and hope they had long enough attention spans to watch your work. Luckily for the modern filmmaker, however, the internet gods have blessed us with the video sharing social network that is YouTube.
That’s great right? Filmmakers can upload, for free, some or all of their body of work and it’s instantly accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem (assuming anyone still uses a modem). People in China can watch your stop motion video about sandwiches. Your video can be featured on other websites, hotlinked, embedded, e-mailed, Twittered, MySpaced, Facebooked and all sorts of other made up verbs. In less than five years, YouTube has created a plethora of internet celebrities (both human and animal) who have seamlessly entered the modern zeitgeist using a technology unimaginable even ten years ago.
Alright then, grab your video camera-or hey, the digital camera you used at your cousin’s graduation, or even the video feature on your £100 mobile phone- and you can become the next David Lynch!
Today, everyone is a filmmaker. In the last few years ‘Point and Shoot’ has rapidly taken on new meaning. The ins and outs of camera work, shooting techniques have all but disappeared from view. The technological constraints in terms of size have also forced films to be shorter, which is helpful in a society that can only pay attention to something for a small period of time (or, is it because we live in a nano-second environment that our attentions are so fleeting? Which is the cause and which is the result?). Plus there’s the legal question, once you publish your film to YouTube is it really yours anymore, or is it theirs? And what if someone downloads your video from YouTube and claims it as their own, how can you prove you made it?
So here you are, a budding young filmmaker eager to share your craft with the world, ready to embrace your sure-to-be adoring public, and there’s YouTube with outstretched arms, inviting you to display your art in its virtual gallery. Should you do it?
Probably. Despite all its shortcomings, YouTube is the future, or at least the present and as any up and coming artist will tell you, you have to take what you can get where you can get it. It may not be optimal, in fact it’s almost certainly not optimal, but it’s there, it’s easy and it’s effective.
Of course, if you want legal rights and a share of the advertising revenue, send your films to Raindance.tv.