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Making The Movies

This “So You Want To Be A Journalist” video cracked me up, as a veteran of a trade magazine, as someone was once the kind of radical who staged protests at college administration buildings, and as a Theoretically Wise Person who often speaks to people who would like to be journalists when they grow up:

http://www.xtranormal.com/site_media/players/jwplayer.swf

http://www.xtranormal.com/site_media/players/embedded-xnl-stats.swf

More importantly though, however crude this is as a medium, it’s an important step forward in giving people tools to make movies. There are a tons of these floating around specific to various industries, and it’s a fun little meme, but I’m sure there are people out there who are going to create more sophisticated narratives, and ultimately more sophisticated tools to let people make more movies with more iterations of interactions between the characters. It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of stories people choose to tell when that happens, how fast the technology develops, and at what point, people just choose to make stories and share them with each other, bypassing mainstream entertainment altogether. I actually doubt that the last iteration will ever happen so completely as to put Hollywood out of business. But I’d be curious to see if such tools significantly lower the barriers to production and distribution, and if so, whether anyone else cares.

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