Film Business

My notes on The Business of Film

The "carefully constructed system of film exploitation" is Bharat Nalluri's pithy one-liner depicting the film industry ecosystem and its various value chains. He acknowledges moreover that this tried and tested system under pressure, is having to respond to radical change occurring in the market place. Change in the form of shifting audience behaviour as a result of new digital distribution systems, change in preferences for the kinds of entertainment, the channels they use, how people consume it, when, where, how, who with. And digital technology's inherent capability to duplicate digital content has expanded opportunities to make copies and share media, leading to a commensurate loss of control of digital intellectual property.

The film industry has been both blessed and beset by radical change in recent decades. Digital media, connected devices, internet services, innovations from pov cameras, drone camera mounts, 3D, virtual reality, improvements in NPC AI, through to the now almost conventional innovations of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Furthermore Film is competing with new forms of digital media which is producing shifts in its consumption, from places and locations, to non-location via connected devices, new channels, all enabled by the growing capability and capacity of expanding digital infrastructure. Much of this is driven by advances computing hardware, software and software infrastructure, and by digital content itself, compelling characters, narratives, story worlds. The technological transformation has been propelled by the computer industry, including the computer games, digital animation, and perhaps too by advances in military technology feeding back into markets, entertainment and the world at large. All of these complex interrelated forces, coupled with the increasing fidelity and realism of simulation, and augmented reality aren't simply pull factors, as they both expand and feed into the markets for entertainment with strong digital elements.

Where do you source the money required to develop screen and film projects?

Valuing intangible assets is one of the most pressing challenges for enterprises producing them.
However, we can price the costs of production, the base cost of producing the goods in the first place, usually the cost of labour, paying for the time and attention of creative talent, plus any necessary physical goods, tools and other material goods needed (film hardware, software, computing resources like workstations and render farms, etc.).
Finance can be raised from the following categories of sources: commercial, economic, & cultural institutions.
Typically financiers seek funding support from distributors, equity
Distribution finance ranging from 100% to partial arrangements; buying all or some territory rights, from funding the entire project to selected parts, distributing to outlets, gathering revenue.
Equity finance via funding bodies usually public sector cultural bodies, through to private sector investors such as individuals, shareholdings, tax break investments, and tax credit mechanisms.

Reference Material

Behind the scenes reflections from Peter Jackson's pick up of The Hobbit on Guillermo del Toro's departure as director (link). The pressure of a deadline put on a project that still needed preparation.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/19/9764016/peter-jackson-the-hobbit-movies-terrible-explanation

Designing meta-objects; the containerising of practices and things

Design of a meta-object and integrative attempts at containerising current practice and extant information infrastructures.
The emergence of unplanned for beneficial innovation between so-called information infrastructures and organisational process has been identified others (Leuenberger, 2007; Leuenberger, 2010).
The argument being that the evolution of large scale infrastructures occurs through a co-dependence between the structuring of information objects and organizational/societal form.

Within these fields of understanding

The naive positive turn is an uncritical use of radical realism, an overarching appeal to the objective rationality of techno-societal interventions. In this mode, information infrastructures are instrumental interventions, straight-forward designs that can be dreamed up, developed, and deployed. Understanding success or failure is largely in terms of the rational or irrational behaviour of those involved.

A related but more subtle theoretical frame explains the phenomena of infrastructure through the concept of agential realism, that such the meta-objects of infrastructure acquire a quasi-autonomous existence and exert agency in turn upon their human users.
Indeed the human agency of human protagonists (entrepreneurs, designers, promoters, developers) begins to diminish in comparison with the scale of a meta-object's inertia and momentum. Unexpected behaviour, even the emergence of unplanned for coherence (serendipity) transcending the designers' original intent is evidence of the object's agency, its unintended intentions.

Others attempt to de-humanise the meta-object by re-humanising its operation.
Critical researchers illustrate by deconstructing the 'thingness' of information infrastructures into their constituent micro-objects, technologies and social-organisational relations \citep{StaRuh1996aa}(Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker, 2002; Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010; Edwards, 2010).

Star and Ruhleder's (1996) \citet[p. 113]{StaRuh1996aa} definition of the dimensions or features of what constitutes infrastructure present a useful test for whether the status of infrastructure has been achieved by a particular social technological arrangement.

• Embeddedness. Infrastructure is "sunk" into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements and technologies.
• Transparency. Infrastructure is transparent to use, in the sense that it does not have to be reinvented each time or assembled for each task, but invisibly supports those tasks;
• Reach or scope. This may be either spatial or temporal: infrastructure has reach beyond a single event or one-site practice.
• Learned as part of membership. The taken-for-grantedness of artifacts and organizational arrangements is a sine qua non of membership in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1992; Star and Ruhleder, 1994). Strangers and outsiders encounter infrastructure as a target object to be learned about. New participants acquire a naturalized familiarity with its objects as they become members.
• Links with conventions of practice. Infrastructure both shapes and is shaped by the conventions of a community of practice, e.g. the ways that cycles of day-night work are affected by and affect electrical power rates and needs. Generations of typists have learned the QWERTY keyboard; its limitations are inherited by the computer keyboard and thence by the design of today's computer furniture (Becker 1982).
• Embodiment of standards. Modified by scope and often by conflicting conventions, infrastructure takes on transparency by plugging into other infrastructures and tools in a standardized fashion.
• Built on an installed base. Infrastructure does not grow de novo: it wrestles with the "inertia of the installed base" and inherits strengths and limitations from that base. Optical fibres run along old railroad lines; new systems are designed for backward compatibility; and failing to account for these constraints may be fatal or distorting to new development processes (Monteiro and Hanseth, 1996).
• Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks; the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now visible infrastructure.

These dimensions suggest that infrastructure is attained by accumulating social understanding over time; that design objects are gradual and fluid. /blockquote{Something that was once an object of development and design becomes sunk into infrastructure over time.} /citep[p. 152]{StaBow2002aa}

Interestingly, information infrastructures are complicatedly involved in the ways we understand the cartesian physical world (space).
They shape and are shaped by temporal contingencies, moments and contexts past, present and future.
They intervene in and alter our social-cultural perceptions of place.

OS X El Capitan grief

Note: OS X El Capitan changed permissions on /usr thus breaking access to MacTex's expected path to applications /usr/texbin. On El Capitan you may need to add /Library/TeX/texbin to $PATH. Do so via a shell/terminal e.g. sudo nano /etc/paths. Might also need to delete previous package in /usr/local/texlive. Might also need to change "System Preferences/Security & Privacy/Allow apps downloaded from:" Change to "Anywhere". Possibly unrelated, but on OS X may also need to install legacy Java (link).

Troubleshoot installations? Type command L from the first screen of the installer to open the log window so you can see error messages.

The MacTeX site strongly recommended download via Safari. A warning I ignored at my peril, because downloads on OS X via Chrome produced files with wrong checksums! Proof below...

$ md5 mactex-20150613.pkg
MD5 (mactex-20150613.pkg) = 6aa62533c5aa0bc3d25b166cd67741fb

Yet another download via Chrome produces another (different) checksum.

$ md5 mactex-20150613.pkg
MD5 (mactex-20150613.pkg) = 5bde8e023873ad2b70b28ee28f170f7a

Whereas the stated package checksum for the MacTeX package [14 June 2015], should have been
= bf579a512d31253d828591fdb3644dca

At last a version downloaded via Safari yielded the following...

$ md5 mactex-20150613.pkg
MD5 (mactex-20150613.pkg) = bf579a512d31253d828591fdb3644dca

Lesson learned "do do do run the MD5 file checksum" & "don't use Chrome on OS X for large downloads".

Note: The file downloaded using Safari will also preserve the creation data / date modified, whereas large files downloaded using Chrome will be timestamped today and vary in file size from the original and multiple attempts.