jghenderson
Well-known member
Amen. You nailed it.
The next step: Distribution
- Thread starter Gillvane
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Amen. You nailed it.
Drew Ott
Wish I were banned.
This is partially true. I agree with the overall lack of passion in adolescents today. I'm one of them.
But I've spent a great deal of time observing these issues. I am just wrapping up a rough draft on a 700-page manuscript of a book about social systems at American universities. While there's a somewhat general apathy among young people, there are still the remarkably bright, intelligent, driven ones who I believe will carry us on. The state-of-affairs was both worse and better than I imagined.
All the daring 12-year-olds are just taking longer to get started than in the past, because there is a lot more of the world to explore. We'll be OK.
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
Movies have pretty much plateaued at about 2 hours since the 60's. The average length for silents seem to reach about 90 minutes, then there was a steady increase to the current ~ 2 hours.
What has changed is the shot duration, which has decreased over the same amount of time, and so, one has longer length, but shorter 'moments' in the shot.
Last year I went to several marathons, and most of the audience was 'youth'... I think I and the Wife were part of the < 10% over 40-50... I did not see much in the way of walkouts during these events.
I can't think of a summer tentpole film that is '70 minutes'...
On the other hand in my youth motorcycle vs. hippies films perhaps were 70 minutes long...
The optimal length for a film that I am going to watch in one sitting at a movie theater is 90 minutes. I call it the butt hurt factor. After 90 minutes my butt hurts from sitting in the theater seat. I don't want to miss the movie from going to the bathroom and there's no pause button. Once is fine, but after 90 minutes if I've had a soda...and I am going to get hungry. I want more than popcorn after 90 minutes and I don't want to eat a hamburger in a dark theater.
It's really a matter of comfort, not just attention span. 90 minutes is plenty to tell a good story and wrap it up before my butt hurts.
It's really a matter of comfort, not just attention span. 90 minutes is plenty to tell a good story and wrap it up before my butt hurts.
I think the missing links are a couple of things and the big name tech companies are working on it.
1. Hooking your computer to your TV. I watch movies on my Television with the remote in my hand to change the volume, maybe change channels during a commercial, or the pause button if it's DVR. I sit in a comfortable chair, sofa, etc. That is the way people like to watch movies, not sitting at the computer or holding a laptop. Yes, it's possible now ot hook your TV to your computer, but it's not easy or ubiquitous. You have to get your online distribution, Vimeo, Netflix, etc., hooked up to the TV and it has to be as easy as plugging it in and turning it on, AND everyone with a computer has to have one.
2. New gate keeping systems. We actually benefit from gatekeepers because they filter content. I do not want to listen to 8 million songs to find 5 I like. I may find 5 songs in the top rotation of songs a radio station plays. They have filtered out the other 7.99 million songs released that year for me. That's a good thing. If I feel like digging through those other millions of songs, I can.
Right now there are no reliable sites that filter out all the crappy indie movies made and come up with a good solid list of about 100 or so for the year that rise to the top.
I don't want to watch 10,000 movies to find 4 or 5 that I like.
We're getting there with rating systems, algorithms that shoot popular productions to the top of search engines and so forth, but it's still very fractured.
1. Hooking your computer to your TV. I watch movies on my Television with the remote in my hand to change the volume, maybe change channels during a commercial, or the pause button if it's DVR. I sit in a comfortable chair, sofa, etc. That is the way people like to watch movies, not sitting at the computer or holding a laptop. Yes, it's possible now ot hook your TV to your computer, but it's not easy or ubiquitous. You have to get your online distribution, Vimeo, Netflix, etc., hooked up to the TV and it has to be as easy as plugging it in and turning it on, AND everyone with a computer has to have one.
2. New gate keeping systems. We actually benefit from gatekeepers because they filter content. I do not want to listen to 8 million songs to find 5 I like. I may find 5 songs in the top rotation of songs a radio station plays. They have filtered out the other 7.99 million songs released that year for me. That's a good thing. If I feel like digging through those other millions of songs, I can.
Right now there are no reliable sites that filter out all the crappy indie movies made and come up with a good solid list of about 100 or so for the year that rise to the top.
I don't want to watch 10,000 movies to find 4 or 5 that I like.
We're getting there with rating systems, algorithms that shoot popular productions to the top of search engines and so forth, but it's still very fractured.
...The other option is the fairly recent phenomena of taking a 4 hour film and releasing it as two 2 hour films. I'm thinking of the final two Harry Potter films or the final two Twilight films. ( and now we have The Hobbit split into three parts )
These films could have been released as one 3 hour movie, but I am sure the bean-counters stopped this from happening.
...Out of curiosity, how many novel had you read by the time you finished high school?
I finished high school way back at the end of the 70's, and had read about 200+ novels by the time I graduated. Most of my friends had read about the same amount.
Today, between my nephews and the sons of my close friends, most of the boys had read about 2-3 novels by the time they graduated HS. This is a big difference from my generation. ( We didn't have video games, which I am sure is a significant factor for boys. My nieces aren't as keen on video games and they seem to read way more books, probably close to the 200+ novels from my day. )
Somewhat off topic but IMO the Hobbit was a 90 minute story stretched out into 3 hours and two movies for no good reason.
I think the same is true about the last couple of Twilight movies. Nothing much happened in the first part of the finale and you could have easily condensed both movies into one concise story.
I'm not opposed to breaking up a long tale into several parts, but there's no reason to drag a story out just to make two movies.
Drew Ott
Wish I were banned.
I read very few novels before finishing high school. I only got into reading fiction after I left formal education (I didn't go to college). School really really killed the pleasure for me. I've always read lots of nonfiction, usually about filmmaking. But I never understood the value of literature until I wasn't required to write essays about it.
I wish I had read more growing up. I do know some people who read, but not many. Formal education is so compartmentalized, that if you aren't studying English, you probably won't read any books during college. Some of my best friends study biomedical engineering at university and are absolutely brilliant, but none of them read books and haven't been required to touch a work of fiction during their time at college. So in my opinion the idea of higher education making people more "well rounded" is a myth. It is in fact quite the opposite.
adkimery
Veteran
These days it is as easy as turning the TV on. I'd say most any recent HDTV is internet ready and comes pre-loaded with majors apps like Netflix, YT, Pandora, Amazon streaming, Hulu, etc.,. Not to mention the plethora of set top boxes from Roku, Seagate, Western Digital and that BR players and video game consoles provide streaming services as well. 5 or 6 years ago getting streaming content to the living room TV was a chore but today it's a breeze.
I agree that gate keepers are a natural creation in any system. I mean, look at the success of specific channels on YouTube people going to a destination that has 'pre-approved' content. The downside is when gate keepers flex their muscle which seems inevitable (again, see YouTube and the fall out between big channels and their talent) and then a new more 'friendly' gate keeper pops up to off an alternative and the cycle goes on and on. Today there are certainly more gate keepers than in the past but they still exist and will continue to exist because they perform a role in the market.
-Andrew
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
I watched "Les Miserables"(2012) sitting on metal folding chairs... They were only slight less comfortable than the straight backed chairs I watched "Elisabeth", a german musical on the life of Empress Elisebeth of Austria.
The reason for the folding chairs was due to the Wife's preference for sitting in the last row of the theater, directly under the projection booth... and the theater had cleared out the 'cushioned' seating for a wheel chair access platform...
j1clark@ucsd.edu
Veteran
It was a 'liberal arts' major that produced, supposedly... 'well rounded' graduates... it was always known that the hard science courses produced fascists who smoked cigars, wore jack boots, and had a needle point focus, and the men who graduated from such programs weren't much different...
jghenderson
Well-known member
I understand the concept of comfort, and lord knows when I saw LOTR: Return of the King, I was in pain for the last hour because I had to go to the bathroom really badly but was not about to miss one minute of that (this was opening night).
However, I firmly disagree that 90 minutes is plenty of time to tell a good story. I think 90 minutes is the BARE MINIMUM, and that's only assuming it's a small story or a comedy. I think that to truly tell a story of depth you need at least 2 hours. Personally I dislike seeing movies in the theater that are under 2 hours.