Comment by akg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akg | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried out Amazon Studios: http://studios.amazon.com/? That seems to be a big step in this direction. Amazon.com has already created a big threat in the publishing industry with e-books and self-publishing. I think hollywood is next with the democratization of content and technological tools.

It used to be that to create "Hollywood grade" movies would require tons of expensive equipment and capital. I don't see that to be the case anymore. There is powerful software (some even free, e.g., Blender) and hardware (http://www.red.com/) to create high-quality productions at a fraction of the budget.

Having worked at a film studio for a few years, I can say that they are definitely struggling to compete. Mostly because they are slow to adapt to the changing landscape. Slow because they either don't want to change or are too arrogant and feel they don't need to make an effort to change.

I've got three different friends who won $20,000 each through Amazon Studio's script contests. One guy won 20k twice and has a producer with a very respectable track record attached to one of his projects there now. My friends are all very happy with their experiences thus far, though everyone is curious what the next steps will be like.

Many artists steer clean of Amazon because it is trying to democratize art through crowdsourced development. Can you imagine what would have happened to Blade Runner if Ridley Scott had even less control on the final cut?

Can you imagine what the complete works of Shakespeare would look like if he were responsible for releasing any of the folios we use today?

The whole idea of being absolutely loyal to the artist's intent is a cultural idea that has come in and out of vogue, but is largely an artifact of 20th century America. Really, art has always been crowdsourced in some sense or another, and any work of art is in some sense an amalgam.

Sure, crowdsourced over time (the bible..). But what is wrong with wanting to understand the author's original intent? There is plenty of time over the next hundreds of years for the work to be re-interpreted.

Didn't some of our greatest open-source tools start from a single source before being disseminated among us to evolve?

There's nothing wrong with trying to understand the author's original intent. But the author's intent isn't necessarily more important than the reader's interpretation (and trying to separate the two can miss the point of art.)

As a counterargument (although I agree with you in this case): it was just as well George Lucas had less control over the original Star Wars films, as the prequels proved.

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