Fugitive Wirecard ex-Mgr Marsalek allegedly behind Russian spy ring (German)
127 karma · joined May 16, 2013
Coming at this from another angle: people in film approach me with ideas for products, and always ask "where can I find a coder?"
The only answer I have for them is that they don't need a "coder". They need a co-founder.
Sounds like you were in a gnarly situation and did well to get out. You are what you do, and those types of places can have a long-term corrupting influence on your professional habits and instincts.
The observation that “all companies have politics” is about as useful as the observation that both Venezuela and Denmark have imperfect governments. These statements are correct only in the narrowest sense.
Those pointing out that you never work for “yourself” are also technically correct. If you own a business, you have a responsibility toward your customers. The good news is that it’s possible to find a niche in which you actually like your customers and enjoy doing right by them. Running your own company also gives you the opportunity to optimize for what you think is important, both personally and professionally.
Best of luck.
Even a 10:1 shooting ratio was pretty low for indie features in the 35mm days. Nowadays it's not uncommon to see shooting ratios upwards of 30:1 on digitally acquired productions. (Although that number varies a lot with the director.)
So collecting VFX shots in a pre-rendered state is notoriously difficult. Doesn't mean it's not worth trying. But you'll probably end up with various decomposed elements (models, rigs) and not something you can easily and quickly re-output in 4k, HDR, etc.
(I used to run a post production boutique and learned this the hard way.)
Ev Williams' previous startups (Blogger, Twitter) along with other networks like FB all rely on users producing endless streams of content FOR FREE. This seems to be working when the "content" is 140-char witticisms, cat videos, or various forms of lifestyle/status/virtue signaling. The "content producers" seem to think that the tradeoff is worth it.
The math is very different when it comes to producing thoughtful, long-form, polished content. Ev Williams hoped that he could provide writers with enough incentive to do that sort of difficult work on the Medium platform.
But even assuming that there are enough writers willing produce high-end content gratis, it is still unclear what incentives Medium is offering in exchange for moving your operations into their walled garden. A better <TEXTAREA>, plus some hand-waving about the future, isn't cutting it.
The hard truth is that we pro folks aren't that lucrative. Pro users probably sit in the bottom of a smiling curve with high-volume consumer products on the one side, and high-revenue Enterprise on the other. To a company like Apple, pro users represent the worst of both worlds.
That's why you also see "media storage" companies like G-Technologies, who introduced pro products (like the late G-Speed) only to abandon that market for high-volume, low-touch consumer products like LaCie Rugged.
I want a new MBP with an nVidia GTX 1080 as much as the next guy, but I'm not holding my breath.
Film production is a smiling curve: on the left you have "development"; on the right, distribution. Actual content creation is 100% farmed out to production companies and their vendors (like VFX houses, et al).
* The first merely inconveniences people who already work in a given industry, by forcing them to learn new tools or workflows.
* The second unseats incumbents and fundamentally shifts power dynamics.
"Hollywood", "Film" et al have by and large not been disrupted yet, in the second sense. Digital change came late to film & tv. We are just now on the tail end of digital transformations that will enable the second wave of disruption.
I've written about this extensively, it's kind of my bag: http://endcrawl.com/blog/two-digital-revolutions-disruption/
* It takes a lot of people to write software, too. Those SoMoLo SaaS world-changers don't design and code themselves.
* But, the tech industry has found ways to bootstrap ideas that do not involve eight- or nine-figure up-front bets. The only difference between "high end" movies and "indie film" is that indies merely require six- or seven-figure up-front bets.
* Every industry that is disrupted goes through two revolutions: (1) it is digitized, i.e. it joins the "World Of Bits" (VGR) or the "IT Era" (Stratechery's phrasing); and (2) it is networked, i.e. the Internet enables new business models and production modes.
* That first revolution usually benefits incumbents. It lets them do the same exact things, more efficiently.
* Further, that first revolution is commonly confused with "disruption". But if it's not unseating incumbents -- it ain't.
* Filmed entertainment is still at the tail end of this first revolution. (I had the first two RED cameras, so I've had a front row seat to this.) But many pieces of the supply chain are still mired in Paper Belt mentality.
I mainly wrote this to stimulate discussion and thought among my film industry peers. Ironically, there's been far more engagement from y'all hackers instead. Probably because hackers, like rappers, tend to think of themselves as entrepreneurs by default. Filmmakers: you need to catch up.
There are already some very attractive implementations: https://www.spotify.com/us/
That page plays fine on mobile, sans parallax, too.
As a shipping clerk I got to see a lot of hair-brained patent apps. Picture a diagram of a shoebox decorated to look like a mailbox and the words "KIDDIE MAIL" scrawled on the side. Yeah, somebody was trying to patent that. Most applications were like that one--complete wastes of everybody's time and money.
Seems like we've replaced "Kiddie Mail" with "RAM" and "ROM" but not much else has changed, except, presumably, the volume.