Media Is Constantly Evolving – as Is Your Place in It

When I started making films, YouTube didn’t even exist yet. I thought I was going to make a few short films and then jump into making features. For many years, every time I didn’t make a full length movie, I felt guilty, like I was letting myself down. I had a dream, and why wasn’t I following it?

But I kept writing. Kept filming. Kept creating. The drive was there, I just got less sure of what I was driving toward.

When you tell people you’re a writer or a director or actor – pretty much anything to do with being creative – the opinions will pour out of people. Not only opinions on the quality of your work and talent, but where it’s taking you, what you should do next. The problem is that nearly all of their advice is probably wrong.

You can’t take advice on how to win a race when no-one knows the finish line. I was all due to make bigger movies, because there wasn’t a market for smaller movies.

But then YouTube happened. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram happened. Hell, even Vine happened. I don’t understand Vine, but some other filmmakers do and they’ve built a career out of it.

It’s easy to get nostalgic for the great days of TV and cinema, but those greats we pine for weren’t being nostalgic, they were discovering the possibilities of a creative medium. The cinema screen was a big canvas and everyone from Chaplin through Tarantino was experimenting with different ways of painting.

Now cinema has changed. A blog I wrote on The Huffington Post suggested movies were past their sell by date, but that’s not necessarily true. As we’ve seen recently with ‘Boyhood’, there’s still room for innovation. It’s just that great movies are now very much a rarity. The audience has become fragmented, and people consume their entertainment in a variety of different ways.

I’ve been given all sorts of advice when it comes to my work. I was told I wouldn’t get anywhere without going to University. I was told I’ll never get hired without an agent. I was told there’s no audience or market for short films on the internet.

But now everything is on the internet. The skills of mine that were useless five years ago are now in demand. Imagine if I’d listened to all those who told me to do something different?

The only thing to do with your art is to keep practicing it. Follow your instincts and find your voice.

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Photograph by Simon Nicholas

 

I started out making short and often humorous comedy sketches, purely because I liked doing it. And then it became a viable business model because people started hiring me to create their acting showreels. Then I started getting hired for screenplay writing jobs, and advertising gigs. It turns out that the short form scripts I’ve been writing all my life are able to provide me with a living. Who’d have thought? It wasn’t a possibility in 2006. Maybe it wasn’t even possible on 2012. In fact there are still people in 2015 who’d say it’s not possible but what you realise when you’ve been doing this stuff long enough is that anything is possible, you just need to find your angle. Learn your craft and the rest will follow.

If you’re a writer, I think you need to keep abreast of all the new platforms for telling a story. Maybe you need to pen a thousand page novel, or maybe you need to just write a fifteen second comedy sketch. Ideas come in so many different forms.

As an actor, it’s no longer just about your TV credits. There are performers making a living on YouTube, on Vine, and I’m sure in many different ways I’m not even aware of. When you see a Hollywood actor doing a FunnyOrDie sketch, they’re not just on a lark, it’s part of their career. A great online piece can do as much for you as a movie. This wasn’t even thinkable a few years ago.

The way we consume entertainment is rapidly changing. You can’t presume you know what is happening because you don’t. None of us do. Many of us are making a living doing things that didn’t even exist two years ago. And there are people fifteen years younger than me who are inventing things on apps and social networks that I’ve never even heard of.

As artists, we want to be seen, we want to be understood. We have big dreams, and if we’re not careful, they get lost and mangled inside this idea of how we think things should be.

We can spend time thinking about how things should be, mourning the loss of our old viewing habits, or we can be open to the new world. A revolution is taking place. It affects production, distribution, and importantly, the very way in which we are creative. You’re either on board with the future, or you can cling on to how things used to be.

There are times, for sure, when I want things to remain the same, but nothing ever does. Our role as artists is to keep telling stories, just like I am doing now – on a blog. A thing that didn’t exist twenty years ago and may not be here tomorrow.

Email Me: dj@danieljohnsonfilms.co.uk
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