Tuesday, June 5, 2007

What's next?

Things seem very slow in town work-wise. Makes getting on a pilot look like a cake-walk. The TV shows seem to be staffed with everyone but PA's. I'm waiting to hear on a few features, but in the meantime the bills keep coming, so pragmatically speaking it looks like temping is in my imminent future.

Of course, there are the strike rumblings, but I don't think that it will actually happen. In 2001 we had the defacto strike simply because the threat was enough to panic the studios into stockpiling scripts. This trickled down and really hurt us wage slaves. I know I was out of work for a time as a result.

It may yet happen again, unless it has begun already. Or is it just part of the bell curve of the changing face of media? In 2001 the promise of TV on the internet had failed, now 6 years later we have YouTube and the Director's Guild is signing deals for internet broadcast webisodes.

Look at the Fall line-ups, so little scripted material in network TV. More reality and very few half hour comedies. More spin offs of hour long franchises. In my opinion, cable continues to stand out as the superior product generator. Maybe that's what's happening? It's been two camps, cable versus network -- each trying to eat the other. Only now there's the internet and it's gnawing at them both.

Will the internet eat the networks? Will cable eat the internet? Will the internet eat everyone and the phone companies too? And where does that leave us? The content creators and workers - those of us who actually do the things that get the stuff out there? If everyone can create content, where does that take us?

At the intersection of art and new media, a place where the convergence emerges.