Stay Employed in the USA - Get a Cinema Degree and Make Your Own Movies, Sony Wants Content
It looks like a Cinema degree is the new MBA according to Elizabeth Van Ness of the New York Times. "People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not represented" says Rick Herbst, a student at Yale Law School who majored in film.
The earlier generation of film students, competing for very few director slots, often ended up employed for their technical - not creative - skills, very much like people who majored in Computer Science in the 1980's. "You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll work into this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more pigeonholed as a technician" said Aaron Bell, a film major who languished until he got a nice job in advertising. Ah, just like very few who become Semiconductor Designers or Operating Systems Architects!
Technical disciplines in the last five years have been systematically outsourced to China and India, and that includes the technical aspects of film. As any unemployed IT sysadmin will lament, it's no fun to be a technician when they're cheaper, faster, and better in China. It's the very technical nature of film which kept the numbers of employment opportunities small, and ever dwindling as the global market competes for the tedious detail work - after all, given the costs, time, and equipment, only a limited amount of content could be created and distributed. And even though Gartner says that companies often spend more for outsourced services than that available in-house, it's difficult to fight a determined view that "it's always cheaper over there" even when you've got the numbers backing you. And since "many of those smaller companies are owned by VCs" (Alexa Bona, Research Director, Gartner), the money flows are against you, not with you. So where do you look? You look at the Internet and service models that make the technical transparent and emphasize creative media in every field from medicine to politics.
With the availability of the Internet, service models, and modern scalable production processing techniques like those offered by ExecProducer, technical and cost limits can be obviated. "For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job is no longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique - newly democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word 'film' an anachronism - the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military."
Where can you place content once you make it? Well, how about Sony? I remember last year William Jolitz told me he met with a Sony executive, asked about content, and the short answer was "Sony isn't interested in content at all" (William was discussing pocket vaio production needs, which only has album covers on it but could do more). Of course, the perfect storm of ipod, itunes, and low-end gadgets from other competitors was obviously coming, but he refused to see it. Now that Sony is cleaning house, I assume that attitudes will change.