Are Filmmaking and Film School Going Down The Drain?

Presently, there are a lot of home-made movies that have been sprouting like mushrooms on the internet; this makes us question, "is filmmaking - and proper training in film school - still profitable?" Is there still a future left for the film business?

To answer that inquiry correctly, we have to appropriately define our terms. Film actually does not have a future. Most of the time, movies are shot and projected digitally. In this type of industry, there are holdouts. Steven Spielberg shoots on film and hasn't wanted his works to be projected digitally. But even he had to succumb in his last project, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". The distribution mogul, Paramount Pictures, released it both on film and digitally. Michael Bay states "I'm old school because I like to shoot on film." For the Transformers creator, he prefers his films on screen, rather than on an iPod. These two film giants, Bay and Spielberg are still part of the band of filmmakers who want to tell their stories professionally on the big screen.

But does that kind of cinema have an audience any more? The kind of filmmaking with characters and a plot and set-ups that have to be edited simultaneously? The fact that today's largest hits are home-movie clips of "The Worst Ice Cream Ever" and "Spider-Tard," prompts us to ask: are people still going to watch feature films?

Cory Doctorow, a writer who believes that "commercially minded" big budget movies "might simply die", claims in an online article called "Media Metamorphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform or Destroy Your Favorite Medium" that the future will be controlled by cheap and crummy YouTube videos which, he says, will be seen by you and the "38 other people who are kinked just like you."

Is he right? Is film-going soon to be a fading memory? Will people become more inclined to watching a fuzzy home movie on their cellphones? Is the kid with the flip-cam now the master of the marketplace? Let us go to the facts. The film "Where the Wild Things Are" grossed over 30 million dollars this weekend. That's about 3 million people who went to see it in just 3 days and box office for the weekend is up 40% from the same time last year. This figure shows that no one video on the web has gathered this much response from the public - ever! Even the low-budgeted feature (approximatey 20,000 dollars) "Paranormal Activity" has made over 30 million dollars - on the average, that's about $25,000 per theater.

Interestingly enough, ever since the internet has become a primary part of our lives, annual box office has not dropped. The downtick in profits is actually better than the downturn in the economy - it hovers around 1-2% annually. Truly, this tells us that people still prefer to experience the movies in the movie theater with other people and with fancy food - they still want to lose themselves in something outside of real life.

"You try to tell a story that's meaningful, and share it with people," this is what the celebrated creator of "The Da Vinci Code" Ron Howard told the current DGA Quarterly. This shared story is what links the people with their fellow moviegoers - and this is what they need. So while film may be dead, the prognosis for the filmmaking process and film school is good and the future of the movie-going experience seems strong and vital.