jamesq | On Movies, Animation and the Open Source Movement

Prediction: Within 5 years, someone will release a feature length animated movie that was created entirely by a single person.

True, that person will be using an assload of computers, but as someone who currently has five working computers in the home (and access to twice that many if I were doing something as cool as making a movie), access to many computers is not really a hardship. If you’re willing to dig, you can find Pentium IIIs for about twenty bucks a piece. With some basic networking hardware and open source software you could have your own render farm for less than the cost of a single high end computer now. It would be about as powerful as the hardware Pixar used to make Toy Story. Make sure you have a RAID and offsite backup though, or there will be tears.

Of course, the hardware isn’t really the issue. Whether this person is judged as a nerd with an agenda or a visionary filmaker depends entirely on the story. A good story will be rightly hailed (and the trail blazed will be followed by many others - some good, some bad). A poor story will be judged by it’s tools, rather than it’s maker. This might set the phenomenom back a few years, but it won’t stop it. Too many people who want to be filmmakers combined with the ever increasing power of computers and software will see to that.

Initially these pioneers will have to do everything themselves. This is why I’m not one of them. I have no skills as an artist, and no amount of computer hardware is going to make me one. I just don’t have the talent and nobody is going to sit through two hours of stick figures, no matter how well rendered they are.

But things will open up. Some people are wonderful artists, but that may be all they do. Nobody is going to sit and stare at a beautifully rendered set (or a wonderfully rendered character floating in space) for two hours.

We need to get these people working together. When I can buy a fully realised set of cowboys on a fully realised western set, then I can go and attach it to the wonderful western I’ve written. Pass the artist a couple of bucks, or a percentage and I’m off and running with my garage full of computers. If the models are all built to some kind of standard, then many people can pool their talent in an ad hoc manner to make movies. If the distributed community of Linux developers can make an operating system as good as Windows, then the movie buffs of the internet can make a movie as good as anything by Warner Brothers.

You could even finance the movie over the net. Auctioning off points on eBay for example.

I would not be at all surprised to find that people are already doing this. Legend has it that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started off this way prior to being found by a major studio.

I know a couple who could probably pull this off by themselves if they had the tools. He is a decent enough writer and she’s an accomplished artist. Set them up with someone who could keep a basement full of computers operating and they could make a strange little movie in no time. It would probably involve cute little kittens and bunnies wearing diapers, but it would be a movie.

Want to make things even cheaper? Instead of rendering a fully animated movie, film a live action one. Several movies have been made on the cheap this way. A digital camera, a macintosh with the appropriate software and a lot of time can make you a movie. The internet is full of these kinds of movies. Mostly it's pornography, but people have made real movies, released to theaters and everything, with just that equipment. But lets talk about porn for a moment. The Internet's real strength (aside from allowing people to watch porn without having to leave their homes and risk embarrassment) is to allow rare sexual peccadilloes to flourish. No matter what your particular kink is, you can probably find a video of it somewhere on the internet. The low cost of making the video, along with a global audience, allows would-be pornographers to make movies of even the most bizarre fetish profitably.

Now apply this reasoning to normal movies. If you like a certain genre of movie that is considered unprofitable, you might be able to make it work through cheap production and distribution. Want to make a western? Go ahead, all you need is some people and horses. The idle son of a rancher with some aspiring actor friends could do it in a year. A musical based on the songs of Henry Rollins? Write a script, practice your hollering and find an abandoned factory and go to it (it would be better if you wrote your own songs though, I suspect ol' Henry would sue if he found out). If it is cheap enough, and if you're not completely talentless, you can find an audience.

Blank DVDs are cheap and so is colour printing, I bet you could even mass produce it for all the local video stores. Let the manager have a look and offer him free copies. One day, video stores will have a "local movie" section the way some comic shops currently have "local comic" sections.

I've gotten away from the idea that a single person can do this. How about this: Talent + People + Money = Constant. As one or two of these things goes down, another one has to go up. The sort of visionary who could make a movie by themselves is very rare, being highly talented in numerous, diverse fields. A few people could make a movie if they each have complimentary talents. Hollywood is full of movies made by hacks with access to money and people.

As time goes by, the technology becomes less expensive to buy. The constant goes down as we remove Money from the equation. This is the world we are in now. The constant is now low enough for a single person, and this also means it's also easier than ever for multiple people to get together and make movies.

If I had the time, I would put my money where my mouth is. I have the hardware, I know people who can use the software. Of the diverse talents whom I know I can count (off the top of my head) writers, actors, costume designers, set producers, grips and sound engineers. I bet we could fake a lot of the other requirements.