The accelerating fluidity of bits will continue to overtake media for the next 30 years, furthering a great remixing.
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At the same time, the cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, YouTube Capture, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images and upsetting a great asymmetry that has been inherent in all media. That is: It is easier to read a book than to write one, easier to listen to a song than to compose one, easier to attend a play than to produce one. Feature-length classic movies in particular have long suffered from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle pieces of chemically treated film and paste them together into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential billions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement, and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.
This is not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention—but it is also very rare. Every year about 600 feature films are released in North America, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is minuscule. It is an insignificant rounding error.
We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film is a rare tiger. It won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming critters below—the jungle of YouTube, indie films, TV serials, documentaries, commericals, infomercials, and insect-scale supercuts and mashups—and not just the tiny apex of tigers. YouTube videos are viewed more than 12 billion times in a single month. The most viewed videos have been watched several billion times each, more than any blockbuster movie. More than 100 million short video clips with very small audiences are shared to the net every day. Judged merely by volume and the amount of attention the videos collectively garner, these clips are now the center of our culture. Their craftsmanship varies widely. Some are made with the same glossiness as a Hollywood movie, but most are made by kids in their kitchen with a phone. If Hollywood is at the apex of the pyramid, the bottom is where the swampy action is, and where the future of the moving image begins.
The vast majority of these non-Hollywood productions rely on remixing, because remixing makes it much easier to create. Amateurs take soundtracks found online, or recorded in their bedrooms, cut and reorder scenes, enter text, and then layer in a new story or novel point of view. Remixing of commercials is rampant. Each genre often follows a set format.
For example, remixed movie trailers. Movie trailers themselves are a recent art form. Because of their brevity and compact storytelling, movie trailers can be easily recut into alternative narratives—for instance, movie trailers for imaginary movies. An unknown amateur may turn a comedy into a horror flick, or vice versa. Remixing the soundtrack of the trailer is a common way to mash up these short movies. Some fans create music videos made by matching and mixing a pop song soundtrack with edited clips from obscure cult hit movies. Or they clip scenes from a favorite movie or movie star, which are then edited to fit an unlikely song. These become music videos for a fantasy universe. Rabid fans of pop bands will take their favorite songs on video and visibly add the song’s lyrics in large type. Eventually these lyric videos became so popular that some bands started releasing official music videos with lyrics. As the words float over visuals in sync with the sounds, this is a true remixing and convergence of text and image—video you read, music you watch.
Remixing video can even become a kind of collective sport. Hundreds of thousands of passionate anime fans around the world (meeting online, of course) remix Japanese animated cartoons. They clip the cartoons into tiny pieces, some only a few frames long, then rearrange them with video editing software and give them new soundtracks and music, often with English dialogue. This probably involves far more work than was required to draw the original cartoon, but far less work than it would have required to create a simple clip 30 years ago. The new anime vids tell completely new stories. The real achievement in this subculture is to win the Iron Editor challenge. Just as in the TV cookoff contest Iron Chef, the Iron Editor must remix videos in real time in front of an audience while competing with other editors to demonstrate superior visual literacy. The best editors can remix video as fast as you might type.
In fact, the habits of the mashup are borrowed from textual literacy. You cut and paste words on a page. You quote verbatim from an expert. You paraphrase a lovely expression. You add a layer of detail found elsewhere. You borrow the structure from one work to use as your own. You move frames around as if they were phrases. Now you will perform all these literary actions on moving images, in a new visual language.
An image stored on a memory disk instead of celluloid film has a liquidity that allows it to be manipulated as if the picture were words rather than a photo. Hollywood mavericks like George Lucas embraced digital technology early (Lucas founded Pixar) and pioneered a more fluent way of filmmaking. In his Star Wars films, Lucas devised a method of moviemaking that has more in common with the way books and paintings are made than with traditional cinematography.
In classic cinematography, a film is planned out in scenes; the scenes are filmed (usually more than once); and from a surfeit of these captured scenes, a movie is assembled. Sometimes a director must go back and shoot “pickup” shots if the final story cannot be told with the available film. With the new screen fluency enabled by digital technology, however, a movie scene is something more malleable—it is like a writer’s paragraph, constantly being revised. Scenes are not captured (as in a photo) but built up incrementally, like paint, or text. Layers of visual and audio refinement are added over a crude sketch of the motion, the mix constantly in flux, always changeable. George Lucas’s last Star Wars movie was layered up in this writerly way. To get the pacing and timing right, Lucas recorded scenes first in crude mock-ups, and then refined them by adding more details and resolution till done. Lightsabers and other effects were digitally painted in, layer by layer. Not a single frame of the final movie was left untouched by manipulation. In essence, his films were written pixel by pixel. Indeed, every single frame in a big-budget Hollywood action film today has been built up with so many layers of additional details that it should be thought of as a moving painting rather than as a moving photograph.
In the great hive mind of image creation, something similar is already happening with still photographs. Every minute, thousands of photographers are uploading their latest photos on websites and apps such as Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Flickr. The more than 1.5 trillion photos posted so far cover any subject you can imagine; I have not yet been able to stump the sites with an image request that cannot be found. Flickr offers more than half a million images of the Golden Gate Bridge alone. Every conceivable angle, lighting condition, and point of view of the Golden Gate Bridge has been photographed and posted. If you want to use an image of the bridge in your video or movie, there is really no reason to take a new picture of this bridge. It’s been done. All you need is a really easy way to find it.