Low-budget movies are making the cut
Jonathan Caouette was a 28-year-old computer illiterate living a Bohemian lifestyle in New York City until a friend gave him an Apple iMac computer.
Caouette quickly mastered iMovie, the consumer-level video editing software that comes free with Apple computers. He used it to digitize the home videos, answering machine recordings and family photos he’d been saving since age 11. Using iMovie’s editing and special effects tools, he transformed two decades of mementos into a bio-documentary, “Tarnation,” which revolves largely around his troubled mother. The movie received rave reviews at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals and has been playing in art house theaters across the country. The DVD will be released in May.
“This literally went from my desktop computer to a worldwide distribution deal in less than a year,” marvels Caouette. “It’s really something of a miracle.”
Computer chips have become so inexpensive and speedy that power-hungry video and audio editing software now run smoothly on the average home computer. At the same time, everyday folks have become more comfortable with computers — thanks to the popularity of the Internet — so they are more likely to embrace digital tools for music, photos and movie making.
This combination of accessible tech tools and pervasive Internet usage has touched off a do-it-yourself revolution in movies, music and art. Amateurs are using computers and multimedia software to create a panoply of digital content. And they are proving to be dexterous at drumming up fans and patrons over the Internet.
“The beauty of all this is you don’t have to wait around for people to give you money to create art,” says Bruce Haring, founder of the DIY Convention, a popular do-it-yourself-themed trade show.
The influence of digital do-it-yourselfers has begun to reverberate through popular culture. Respected movie critic Roger Ebert hails Caouette’s documentary, made for less than $300 in out-of-pocket expenses, as a “powerful and heartbreaking … collage that envelops us in his family story.”
The pinnacle of do-it-yourself financial success: the hit movie “Open Water,” produced by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau for $120,000. To make the shark thriller, the New York City-based husband and wife team invested $6,000 on two Sony “pro-sumer” digital camcorders, aimed at serious hobbyists, and $10,000 on an Apple Power Mac G5 dual processor computer, with Final Cut Pro editing and special-effects software.
Kentis and Lau did all of the camera work, and Kentis did all of the editing at home on his Mac G5. The film earned $31 million in U.S. theatrical release last fall, and is expected to more than double that in DVD sales and foreign screenings.
Kentis hopes do-it-yourselfers begin to rattle the Hollywood aesthetic, which seems to favor formulaic blockbusters. “We wanted to expose a sense of realism and immediacy,” he says. “The whole point was to use the affordable technology and give the audience a real experience, something Hollywood doesn’t seem interested in doing right now.”
Two seminal Web sites where self-produced music often ends up — CDBaby.com and PureVolume.com — underscore how much is at stake in the music industry.
Portland, Ore., rock guitarist Derek Sivers launched CDBaby in 1998 to sell his band’s home-brewed CDs. As an afterthought, Sivers agreed to sell CDs for a few of his buddies’ bands. Through word of mouth, CDBaby has grown into the premier online venue to buy indie music.
Bands pay Sivers a one-time $35 set-up fee and ship him a batch of self-produced CDs and set the retail price, usually $9 to $18. CDBaby handles the online transaction, and keeps $4 of every sale. Every Monday, Sivers mails checks to the bands based on all sales from the previous week.
It’s up to the band to promote sales. If the CDs don’t sell, they chill in Sivers’ warehouse. That arrangement has helped CDBaby sell more than $16 million in CDs, paying out $13 million to the artists. “It all began as more of a utopian experiment to see if I could set up a musician’s dream distribution deal,” Sivers says.
That mind-set appears to be spreading. Launched out of a dingy basement by three University of Massachusetts-Amherst classmates in December 2003, PureVolume.com has attracted about 112,000 unsigned bands to post bios, gig updates and free original songs.