There’s a lot happening in the digital film world. Sites like College Humor and iFilm are acquisition targets for media companies looking for viral content (update: an alert reader pointed out that iFilm was acquired by Viacom last year, though I note there’s no shortage of contenders: for example, Fox is working with EBaums World to make a TV show from their content). Teens make the new L’Oreal commercial as part of their high school media class. And even fan fiction is changing as more people get access to digital moviemaking the same way it changed to a much more public activity when people got access to digital writing equipment (I’m sure next we’ll see slash fic movies).
Movies are more like text than like still images–just like a book, there’s a lot of editing and other post-production work before the raw material is presentable. Because of this labour, digital video won’t become a camphone phenomenon where everyone is suddenly turned into a news reporter. Digital film will become something much more like blogs and the web in general as we see more original and independent voices spring up, but with the same gap between everyone (camphones) and those who have the time and passion to prepare their work for public view (camcorders, blogs). There’s still a budget associated with full-length features, but shorts and viral material will increasingly come from the dark army of camcorder-carrying Peter Jackson fans bringing their imagined world to life on the screens of everyone. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a home-made Angel parody to watch …