We are on the cusp of the most profound disruption of information, communications and the ways we share our stories.
By Michael Caporale
Every day it seems that our world is rocketing into the future at breakneck speed. Those comfortable with a comprehensible traditional life may wish things would remain the same, or even return to a time past, while those more adventurous may well welcome each, and every change as an opportunity for growth. Certainly, there is comfort as well as stability in “the known,” and change inevitably carries risk and delivers uncertain outcomes.
For filmmakers, enormous changes have occurred in rapid succession, particularly since the turn of the century. The movement from film to digital and the availability of inexpensive cameras, together with the preponderance of film festivals and the ever-expanding ubiquitous YouTube, has democratized the craft and broadened communication. The iPhone and it’s replicants, together with social media, exploded the use of video to become the primary communication medium. No one is left out from participating in a medium that just a few short decades ago was the domain of a few privileged, very skilled professionals. It’s time we must ask, “Are we any better or worse off now? Did it ruin professional filmmaking or expand it?” Does democratizing the medium produce better, or just more, media–quantity or quality?
The problems with traditional filmmaking, and its joys as well, are all derived from the fact that filmmaking is a team effort. Those who have fought the battle to make a film have benefited from the struggle. It takes patience and perseverance, both objectivity and subjectivity, decisiveness and ponderance and above all, the ability to collaborate with other people. The writer needs a director who requires a producer who needs actors, locations, wardrobe, props, and a crew, just to name a few. And all this requires money, and let’s not forget, TIME. Lots of time, just to get it made.
But these many components are not the film itself, just a means to an end. If they are not the film, then one might rightfully understand that they are all expendable to the essential core of a film, and that is “story.” The only essential element of a film is story, and that makes the writer the only essential element to the production of a story. After that, to produce a film all else is a matter of circumstance and serendipity.
To understand this is to embrace AI. With the advent of “SORA,” and as Ashton Kucher has justly noted, in the very near future it will be possible to make a film with only a writer, a film made just as the writer envisioned it, unadulterated by massive egos, resistant crews, financial restraints, limited talent and the ever-present, profit-incentivized gatekeepers.
Knowing this, my advice to would-be and aspiring filmmakers is to learn the craft of writing. Major in English, not filmmaking. Learn from other writers. Read all you can. Embrace history. Get political. Take a stand. Represent something good and valuable and then write your story. It won’t be long until you can put a complete screenplay in Sora and have it create a flawless movie from even the wildest imagination.
Let me speak plainly. You don’t need those other bozos. Yes, you will have missed the struggle and all its benefits, building character, learning from others, and socialization through work, and yes the tradition of just plain hard work, but if you want to make that perfect movie and you know that as it stands now you will never make another “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Apocalypse Now,” or “ET,” take heed, your time will come sooner than you ever hoped for. But for now, start planning. Get on the web and check out Sora and be ready to bathe yourself in the flood.