Posts by Jason Kemp
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To summarise then – there is no real strategic plan for the NZ film industry even though it employs ( or as contractors) up to 40,000 people. Yes NZ has benefitted in a number of ways by having some of that money invested in equipment and infrastructure but quite probably much of it has gone to pay for skilled people.
Increasing the subsidies paid to get the large productions here seems unsustainable given the huge change in exchange rates for the NZ $ and all the other competition out there.
Like many other sectors the size of this one is almost certainly distorted by the big blockbusters. In sales terms that is called shooting an elephant. There are only so many of the block busters to go around and that isn’t going to work.
The hard part for people working in the industry is transistioning to something else or moving overseas to where the films are being made.
A strategic plan for the NZ film industry might be able to get a clearer idea of how big of a sector we can use and look to developing local global content where the IP is owned here. Like the “Mighty Johnsons” only more of them perhaps financed by cable networks and more like “Flight of the Conchords”
Possibly this link has already been mentioned.
Nats won’t rule out Avatar sweeteners -
All hail to the autochthons :) I was there too back when computers cost more than cars.
I find commercial radio quite distressing in that the announcing teams seem to delight in being vapid and shallow. Miss 12 likes the music on one channel but when the announcers start talking we just have to turn it off as it is so mind numbing.
So great that there is a new show in town.
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Lets go one step further - what would it take to get PAS as a Freeview channel? It seems like this is a media savvy community that creates content as well as thinking about what and how we all consume - who knows how to set up a freeview channel?
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
Awesome Dylan. Wish I’d read your comments before I added more. You nailed what I was thinking re the veg out thing.
However I like picking my own content regardless of what that is. I have often ended up as the DJ at the party. Its the same with TV and I never have any trouble picking content. However that content is mostly not mainstream.
I’m almost certainly not a typical tv viewer. I don’t watch sports as a rule and would watch almost any movie before a tv programme. I have rated more than 500 films on IMDB and while that took more than 30 years to watch ; a lot of that has come from the video store and more lately itunes or similar
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Danielle,
Not really any of those. More that many just turn on the TV and then watch whatever is on regardless and that often they use the Tv as a backdrop to other activities.
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Here is a comment by Mark Cuban
"TV is becoming a social activity that takes little effort or thought. Vegetate in front of the tube with your mobile device on your lap while you tweet/txt/email/post wherever. Now you are part of the conversation without disturbing the blanket keeping your feet warm.
To be part of the conversation you have to be watching what your friends/followers/you follows are watching at the same time."
the comment comes from a different conversation
Why TV everywhere will kill what’s best about TVIn my experience watching the back channel of hashtags for a popular programme is almost better than the programme directly. It is another way of engaging.
I was also thinking that the product placement on some shows esp the BlockNZ was so overwhelming that there has to be a backlash.
When Advertising No Longer Works
I can understand the funding pressures on making TV in a small population and that is a key part of the topic here. What are the business models when you are in the minority audience?
I think we can sidestep most of the content supply questions by going online but readily admit that is not good for our own cultural curation.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
Thanks everyone re the "passive" idea. I did mean that TV is a kind of moving wallpaper that is on while people wash the dishes or cook or whatever.
No reflection on the watchers but where I was going with that is some (most?) viewers will watch anything that is on - even if they channel surf.
An "active" viewer is someone who picks programmes to watch & generally stops doing other things while they are on.
Broadcasters have programme managers and I think where some of us are heading is that that we can programme our own channels from global sources especially online streams of some kind.
TV is a huge cultural force and our connections to it are many and varied. Some people like to vege out and use tv for escape others are explorers who see a tv screen as a pathway to other content they can programme themselves.
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The 12 yr old in my house amuses me because she likes to read a book while “watching” Xfactor or The Block NZ. Talk to any of them and their TV culture revolves around YouTube and that can be almost anything but it mostly involves some kind of cultural remix or satire.
So broadcast TV is very much wallpaper except for a very few programmes like “Grand Designs” or “Once Upon a Time”.
Being able to watch YT on a TV screen makes it easy to trawl through the back catalogue and view almost anything. With appleTV and airplay we can watch anything that is online and while I suspect that puts our home into a separate demographic – online is the platform of choice rather than say NZ tv which is a hash of Aussie, US, Brit & NZ content.
I watched “Repo Man” ( 1984) with the 12 year old who was quite taken with the satirical tone & mix of aliens, music and OTT acting. Part of her cultural education and only $5 on iTunes. That kind of back catalogue is impossible to beat.
I haven’t watched Shortland St since the first season but the glimpses I get in promos or overlaps when waiting for something else still make me cringe. Its not quite bad enough to be good but it is very bad. I know SPTV is a great training ground for tv makers but I don’t watch any soaps and have never understood the attraction.
I think mainstream TV is mostly for passive viewing. Anyone active who picks programmes to watch in advance is going to roam in the digital world or at their video store. ( Adam Curtis anyone ?)
There are some TV shows that do seem to do very well and they are the ones with 20+ writers so it is clear that there is still some great TV being made.
I do think the measurement of TV viewing is a real problem. It would be better if there was more qualitative measurement.
Like an earlier commenter noted – doesn’t matter how many times Wild Bean cafe was product placed in the Block show we are not going to drink it. I do think some of the brands on the Block were over exposed and ironically that might even have reduced their commercial appeal.
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Transformer came out when I was in high school in the '70's. Courtesy of classmates older siblings we listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, The Guess Who, Wishbone Ash, David Bowie, Elton John and Lou Reed. Back then music seemed to be very much dominated by the big acts and in our little town mostly UK.
Music was a form of time travel then and a kind of ticket to worlds we didn't know about.
It is hard to remember / imagine what the mid '70's pre internet NZ world was like now but that Transformer album was hugely influential. To small town NZ it was all a bit shocking but exciting at the same time.
I rather liked this Robert Christgau piece from 1996
"The core of Reed's sensibility is his visceral aversion to corn. This isn't to deny his goopy side--part of him does wish ladies still rolled their eyes, and "spirit of pure poetry" is his phrase, not mine. But over and above his New York sarcasm and the all he's seen, Reed seems possessed by aesthetic distance. He's never more powerful than when his rock and roll heart transcends his detachment without rejecting it--in cruel yet compassionate touchstones like "Street Hassle" or "The Kids." Usually, however, he settles for something homelier. Whether the topic at hand is joysticks or jealousy or nuclear holocaust or dirty boulevards or ouija boards or s&m or love l-u-v, his pointedly flat plainspeech is more meaningful and evocative per se than his forays into imagery. And what he took away from his apprenticeship with the El Dorados and Pickwick International is just as conversational--an intimate knowledge of the vernacular chords of r&b, adjusted to a deadpan sprechgesang that excised any hint of the soulful expressionism toward which every other white band of the era aspired. Formally, there's an acceptance and a reflexively democratic respect built into this approach that more than counteracts Reed's pretensions and his equally reflexive if visibly diminishing mean-spiritedness. It's equally well-suited to s&m and love l-u-v, to transgression and redemption and just getting by."
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For anyone who wants to check actual rap lyric trends you can use the RapGeniuus site mentioned by Russell to do that
check out lawyers, guns, money on rap genuis or any other set of words for your amusement or serious research