Valentin Spirik: online theme park theatres as the future of film
A contribution from Valentin Spirik, the author of our guide to making your own videos:
- The future of film?
“Just like YouTube seemed like a far out vision only ten to fifteen years ago (remember the time when there was no internet and when no one had a mobile phone?) the cinema of the future might seem like an idealist’s dream today while in fact it is materialising already – in platforms such as YouTube. In the end it is likely to be some kind of open, social media network: the “online theme park theatre”. Core product of such a platform will be a cinematic presentation of a story that relates in a strong way to the theme that the platform is centred around. Since different themes attract different audiences, and different people develop different kinds of stories, a multitude of such platforms (possibly evolving as “genre platforms” and offering a multitude of theme centred, individual projects) will exist. At the same time these shows will also be screened in real world cinemas while digital distribution/projection will further help to democratise the new medium and bring high quality, content rich community produced projects to large mainstream audiences and their established viewing environments. And online you’ll be able to watch a movie in a virtual theatre (either alone or with many others) that you (can) create/interact with while you are watching. The stories you’ll see will have a life of their own, might first need to be developed over a longer period of time (just like e.g. Linux took about ten to fifteen years to mature into a mainstream product), but in the end these multimedia shows will turn out to be our generation’s online classics: myths, legends and stories with heroes and heroines from the new world. It also seems very likely that real world/online (story) worlds will melt into one another in unprecedented ways – which again is only reminiscent of one of the oldest movie themes we know: the exploration of that fine line between dream and reality.
Movies today are prepackaged dreams – movies of the future will be modular, dynamic and interactive dreams.”
- What tools do we need for this?
Valentin Spirik:
“Some of the tools needed for a meta platform like a virtual remix theatre already exist, others are just being built. We already have a couple of open-source movie projects (e.g.: “The Digital Tipping Point” – or “Peach“) while a multitude of high-quality, free and open-source media production and distribution tools are flooding the market that was once dominated by commercial, closed-source, proprietary software from monopolists.
Some of the free and open-source tools (many, many more available) already in place are:
- on the content creation side:
Blender (3D modelling, animation, rendering, video post), Gimp (image and photo manipulation), Inkscape (vector graphics editor), Ardour (digital audio workstation), Kino (DV video editor)
- on the distribution side:
Miro (internet TV and video player incl. BitTorrent support), VLC (media player and streaming server), Songbird (media player and Mozilla based Browser), Plumi (Video CMS); for Wiki style video editing see: sourceforge.net/projects/kaltura), Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora (patent/royalty free audio and video encoding), Croquet Consortium (creation and deployment of collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses).
Next to semi-open/closed platforms like YouTube – does not support Creative Commons licences (creativecommons.org) – there are CC licence friendly platforms like blip.tv (blip.tv) and the incredible non-profit Internet Archive (www.archive.org). Other sites like Ning (www.ning.com) let users create their own social networks including pre-built micro video sharing sites à la YouTube, free to use, CC licence friendly.
In the end not technology but the quality of the actual story that a virtual story park is centred around will make a project work..”
