Something In The Way Movie - YouTube
"One of the things that this can alert us to is that someone with a good story could very likely do something that could be seen my millions of people," said Michael Wesch, assistant professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. "Compare the production quality of 'The Hunt for Gollum' to 'Robocop,' and, in a way, amateurs are only 10 or 15 years behind. With $5,000 you can produce what used to take millions of dollars to produce, and a good story can carry bad production values."
Something in the way movie - YouTube
In the future, Wesch said, movie and television fans can expect to find more user-generated content, as well as Hollywood using YouTube as a way to generate buzz around movies shown in the theater and on DVD.
Yet Wesch's message to Hollywood and its fans isn't one of doom and gloom for traditional movies and television shows. Of all traditional industries, Wesch said, Hollywood may be one of the most safe. After all, he said, it already weathered the revolution that let us watch movies on demand in our own homes.
"Before Hollywood crumbles, you would have to see actors' and actresses' wages come way down," he said. "There are a lot of great actors and actresses willing to work for, say, $20,000 a movie because they love it and want to entertain people."
Yes you can. Just log in to your YouTube Studio page at studio.youtube.com, select 'Settings', then 'Channel' and 'Advanced Settings'. Under 'Clips' you'll see an option that says 'Don't allow viewers to clip my content'. Select that, and clips will be disabled on your videos
MARK BERGEN: Yeah, this was a wave, a revolutionary wave of what we call user-generated content on the internet - so not just websites where people would go and scroll and read, but they could actually participate. And so you had Blogger around that same time, Flickr, the photo-sharing app. Facebook was formed in 2004. And then, months later, there were three friends who had worked at PayPal that had got together. They had this idea. They wanted to do something on video. Video flip cameras were just becoming popular. You know, video was beginning to appear on the internet. But it was still very difficult to share and expensive and cumbersome. And so they - in early 2005, they began working on this site.
BERGEN: Yeah. I think this was still a pretty novel idea and part of this Silicon Valley firm belief that information should be free and be accessible, and broadcast and video should be free and accessible and eventually will be. And YouTube was one of many, but it certainly became the - early on, leapfrogged around its competitors in part because it was so accessible and easy to use. You know, the founders talked about it in emails. This is something that they talked about how their mom should be able to use. And I think, to their credit, that's one of the reasons for its success.
There are theories about sort of mirror neurons and what kind of fires off in our brain when we see someone perform an act that we want to do. And, you know, Ryan Kaji, in early - his early videos, he's not just playing with one toy, often it's dozens of toys. And this is something where kids clearly - there was an appeal to watching this. You know, he was also a really iconic example. He's Asian American. He's someone who didn't even attempt to go through, you know, conventional Hollywood or TV. This is something that YouTube prided itself on was it didn't have gatekeepers. There's no producer or agent that determines whether or not Ryan is popular. It is his mom uploading the videos and then viewers are watching. And that's part of YouTube's magic.
BERGEN: Yes. YouTube was actually remarkably early in that. 2007 is when they started sharing out revenue with broadcasters and in a small group - at that point, around 30 or so popular channels. Fast-forward to about 2011, 2012, YouTube decides this is something where we want to - you know, the company sort of really believes and they have this expression I talk about in the book, like, a level playing field. They saw themselves as a democratizing force in the world, right? You're going to put someone, an amateur, on the same level as a cable news host, right? Or someone who's making how-to beauty, make-up videos, you're going to be just as important as a fashion star. And the Arab Spring was around this time, right? Like, this was - YouTube was sort of documenting revolutions in a way that cable and television was not. And so they opened up the platform to not just have anyone broadcast themselves, but to make money from the commercials that run on and before the videos.
DAVIES: Wow. You know, it's interesting because, I mean, it would be one thing if you were, like, censoring or deleting videos that you disagreed with. But what we're really talking about here is what gets recommended to somebody after they've finished a video. And so that's - it's a matter of discretion. And at one point, I think somebody was talking about, well, maybe if someone, you know, says things that are racist or questioning the Holocaust, that maybe the next video is one which offers some historical context from an authoritative source. Was it felt that that's violating the verdict of audience approval or something?
You know, one of the things that happens when you run a video-sharing service the size of YouTube's is that you can't possibly kind of, you know, curate it all individually. And so they rely on mathematical algorithms to do so much of the work, to filter out, you know, pornography and things like that. And often what will happen is that they will, you know, make a tweak or something, and then it'll change things and affect users and creators.
DAVIES: So you can - you know, you can have your channel limited in a way for something you don't understand. You write that that many creators complained - that is to say, many people who create content for YouTube complained of burnout from the platform's unending demands. And that's kind of sounds confusing if, in fact, you know, the deal is you can upload whatever you want to. What are the demands? What are we talking about?
BERGEN: Yeah, it's really interesting that, you know, people at YouTube talk about this as sort of - in television, there's a set schedule. I know that I'm on a TV shoot for a certain number of months and then I'm off, right? Or a movie - you're working on a movie for a set number of months. YouTube doesn't have that, right? The cadence and the expectation is constant, right? And this is like - it is very profound in part because it's kind of unspoken. Like, there was no one at YouTube telling creators, you must publish every single video every single day. And in fact, YouTube's more recently told them, you can, you know, look at our data. If you take a break, it doesn't actually harm your audience. But there are certainly - you know, a lot of the most successful YouTubers are incredibly astute and study the - they study the numbers. They study their - the metrics. And they can see that, you know, people that tend to produce on a more regular output tend to get a better chance of being distributed, have better audience - right? - have better financial success.
DAVIES: You know, Ingrid Nilsen is one who - she made a lot of money on this. And the weird thing about this is that the notion that you have to produce content very frequently seems at odds to me with the idea that you need to make content that's really arresting to watch. I mean, I would think if you take a little more time, you get something that people are willing to stick with. I mean, I looked at an Ingrid Nilsen video where she takes a shower. She has a bathing suit on, so it's not - you know, nothing inappropriate. But she's explaining what she does when she washes her hair. And she has this product and then she starts, you know, massaging at the top and lets it go down and then she has this conditioner. And kind of amazing to me that that would get a huge following, but it does, doesn't it?
BERGEN: There's something that - a term in academia - and forgive me for this - but parasocial network is sort of I think what you can call YouTube. And the idea is that there are people who watch these creators and influencers and feels that they know them personally, despite never having met them and not knowing them personally. And that's a profound, just, relationship that I think is not really understood. And it - YouTube was the - set the course. That was sort of the first major social media platform to do so. And now a lot of our social - the direction of social media is moving in that way. I mean, if people use Instagram, you realize that it's less and less of your friends and acquaintances and family and more of, say, an influencer you've never met who makes a compelling video. And that is the way that a lot of these tech platforms are moving. It is - it's an emotional burden - I talked to creators - to constantly perform a life on screen.
MM: The winners of the YouTube Scholarship Challenge are, for the most part, self-taught. Often self-taught moviemakers are very independent and have their own way of doing things. What is the balance between individual freedom and VFS-taught methods in the classroom?
Noah: For me, there is something about watching the YouTube channel, Good Mythical Morning, every day that helps me recharge and get through the rest of the day. If you have not watched them before I highly recommend it! They are such a good way to start the day and feel energized.
Gen: My all time favorite comfort movie is Mamma Mia. The music, the dancing, and the scenery sends me into a relaxed and happy state. I am also a huge Marvel fan, so any Marvel movie relaxes me and makes me happy, as well, especially because my childhood comfort characters are in these movies too!
April: I have a few comfort movies. The new Disney movie Soul has become one of the top movies for me. The music, the message, the story is breathtaking and I believe everyone should watch it. My all time favorite comfort movie though is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's so much fun to watch! I have watched it so much I have been able to start to memorize the lines! 041b061a72