I had a fun time judging last night's NewTeeVee Pier Screenings. This was the third in a series of user-generated content showcases, this one dedicated to short films involving product placement. I was joined by Tim Street of FrenchMaidTV and the Greg Goodfried, one the co-founders of LonelyGirl15 and the real star of the show.
The audience of more than 200 had that same casual energy, geeky pride, and we're-part-of-something-really-big optimism that I remember from the dot-com boom. That became a dirty word in the Bay Area, but personally I remember that time fondly. It made me feel like an old-timer.
For me, the evening gave me a number of insights about the current state-of-the-art in indie web filmmaking:
We still expect web content to look it was shot in someone's bedroom. The winning entry, a static camera on a guy painting a wall mural of Colonel Sanders using the sauce from pieces of KFC Teriyaki Chicken, had the kind of quickfire whoah-what-was-that originality of the best YouTube material. I was fascinated to learn that the LonelyGirl crew, now one of the most professional independent web shows around, deliberately dumbs down the shooting style to match the show's original (faux) webcam format.
Be pro, or be amateur. Don't get caught it the middle. The higher production value videos suffered the most, because they weren't slick enough to pass for a TV commercial ported to the web. Somehow because they didn't look totally homemade, the audience was less forgiving of bad lighting, thin dialogue, or dance steps that weren't quite in sync. You really get a sense of how limited your patience is online when you are watching something on a big screen and you can't close the window.
It's harder than you think. The great thing about the explosion of video online is the huge numbers of people who are trying their hand at the medium. It's also the worst thing. I talked about the sniff test for judging "viral" videos- would you pass it on to your own friends? Despite the success of shows like LonelyGirl, Ask A Ninja, or Prom Queen, the door is still open for Hollywood types to crash the party.
We're obviously in a state of flux in terms of the evolution of web content. There's clearly a difference, for example, between episodic web shows (and the fanatical audiences they attract) and the kind of snack-food videos that typically get passed around to more mainstream audiences (see, for example, this amateur video picked up by McDonalds). Will one form win out?
Misha Cornes