Exam Question

Exam Question

Ever since home media was introduced in the early 80’s with the VHS and Laserdisc, cinema attendance has been falling significantly as more people would choose a night in to watch their favourite movies over and over again for free as opposed to having to travel and  to pay for one viewing. Although the film industry wasn’t as animous towards television as it had been in the 50’s, they cramped down hard on the newly established home entertainment market by intruding anti-copyright laws on VHS’s and DVDs. However ever since the Internet started to become mainstream since 1997 which allowed fandom’s of major movie frandises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings to share their, and newer web 2.0 technologies and websites such as Itunes and Google Play have allowed people to download movies legally as opposed to actually buying them physically, The industry have been asking themselves this question: Is this time period the age where the consumer becomes the producer?

For example, there is a fan-made film based on the Lord of the Rings called Born of Hope that was completely funded by a fan named Kate Madison as an entry for a Tolkien Fan Film competition. Taking inspiration from the story of Aragorn’s childhood featured in the appendices’ from The Lord of the Rings and made in six years, This project is a good example of cultural production as  it was entirely produced by fans of the books and movies  rather than the crew at Weta workshop, transmedia as the crew have adapted previously existing source material from the books that was not covered in the Peter Jackson movies, and social and cultural convergence as Kate generated most of the budget for the movie by posting a trailer on YouTube and getting paid for it.

Since some people have been becoming more familiar with posting videos online to sites such as Youtube and Megaupload, people have learnt to use special cd ripping software such as Bid torrent and Adobe Flash to atacully take and copy several clips of a dvd or Blu-ray onto the program and then either splicing the clips together to make a fan-made music video with an example being the Cool z ’Dan’ music and movie videos that put the characters of the Warner Bros movie Cat’s Don’t Dance into other movies and music videos through the power of editing. This software can also be used to create informative videos which the uploader can speak over the video clip with the use of a microphone or in some cases the uploading software can aslo be used to put whole movies and tv shows onto the interent, which unfortally don’t stay on the website for too long as soon as someone working for the movie companies find out about the posted movies availbe online for free, they will immeditally send a resquest to take it down or be banned from Youtube.

In conclusion I that the statement about the consumer becoming the producer is true because of the freedom mainstream audiences are allowed to have more freedom to newer web 2.0 technologies to create their own media.