What the World Needs Now Is More Digital Filmmakers

"More digital filmmakers you say?" Yup, that's exactly what I said. Even in the face of tens of thousands of films being created every year, a multi-fold increase over the number of films shot five years ago (forgive me, I don't have the accurate stats, but there's little argument that, thanks to digital, film production has increased exponentially in the past few years--just ask film festivals who generally received up to 50% more film submissions this year over last). And yes, many, many films being produced by every college kid with a 24P camera are dreck. But there's a political, moral and philosophical reason to keep as many hands on as many cameras as possible. Especially in Canada. And that reason is the shocking concentration of media ownership in so few hands. The Canadian Senate's Transport and Communications Committee concluded that "the concentration of ownership has reached levels that few other countries would consider acceptable." There are single corporate entities that own newspapers, high-speed internet providers, television stations, satellite communications companies, and more, all within the same Canadian regions. When corporate ownership is this concentrated, the possiblity for corruption starts to become a probability. I mean, how does a journalist criticize the content of a television program when the journalist's boss owns that television program? When ownership is that concentrated, the power over what the citizens read and hear becomes disconcertingly vulnerable to manipulation by singular corporate interests. And that's just what the Senate's committee thought too. "[W]e feel that the fewer voices that are out there, the less the public is served," says Senator Jim Munson. Peter Murdoch, Vice-President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada is a bit less diplomatic: "It's not just outrageous or appalling. It's scary."

Meanwhile, the media mega-conglomerates are insisting they need to exploit "convergence" in order to survive the competition of things like Internet video and other forms of online entertainment. And the Canadian government seems to be buying into that argument. Please read Antonia Zerbisias's article (printed in one of the few remaining Candian media sources not owned by Bell Globemedia) to get a sense of how some journalists are finding these developments as frightening as I am. And the irony for the big corporations is that the concentration of media in so few hands only encourages, and indeed necessitates, more individuals to get out there and make movies, to write blogs, and deliver podcasts, in order to satisfy the need for diverse opinions and ideas. The same can be said for every country in the world--artists, writers and filmmakers have historically been relied upon to give us a wake up call whenever we need one. So please, I beg you dear reader, shoot more shitty movies.