[Weekly Update] Is Documentary the Future of Cinema

Are you watching the Academy Award tonight?

I remember my aunt waking up early in the morning to watch it live. She was quite into movies at the time. I was introduced to Back to the Future by indirectly watching from the side. Maybe that was when my destiny was set.

WEEKLY UPDATE

Hope you enjoyed our last video on Chinese memes, as voted by you! If my narration sounds a bit dry, that's because I was sick. I'm still somewhat sick, actually. Anyway, due to the length of the video, there are a lot of memes I didn't include. From Chow Yun-fat Beaver being excluded for being too recent, to Little Fighter, Hong Kong's equivalent of Dong Dong Never Die. To be clear, Little Fighter predates Dong Dong by a lot. Maybe one day we'll make a part 2  of the video. That's the beauty of memes, they come out faster than I can make videos.

Up next, we have a Godzilla video, explaining why Hollywood can't make Godzilla Minus One. It doesn't sound that exciting, but I promise it'll be interesting.

I have started work on a 2 parter video explaining the entire history of Dynastic China. From pre-history to the last emperor, I'll go through most of the dynasties, and shows films from each period. Hopefully, I can bring more nuance to a often generalized "Ancient China".

We are still looking for tentacle movies.

No I will not explain myself further.

MEDIA TALK

So, I began planning for the upcoming solar eclipse.

I thought about what to do. I have plans of making a video, and maybe explain the mythologies behind solar eclipses in Chinese culture. For that, I'll need a lot of detailed footage of the eclipse.

But then I realized something: There is functionally little differences between the eclipse filmed by someone else, than the one filmed by myself. I can search YouTube, and get hundreds of videos that look nearly identical. Obviously I won't be stealing their footage. But the point is, if I do, I doubt anyone can tell.

So, instead, I want to do it analog. I would love to film it with 16mm films. But even if I do, I'd have no way to develop it without breaking my entire bank account. So, it'll just have to be regular old roll of Ilford.

The idea is that I want something physical. I want to hold the film negative in my hand, something that exist in physical space that cannot be easily duplicated or manufactured.

And I realized that desire came from a simple anxiety, induced by AI image generation.

Indeed, with AI video coming soon, I can very well make my eclipse video with an abundance of AI generated eclipse shots. The stock footage market is dead. I can have it be realistic or fantastical. Even without AI, I can reasonable whip up something in After Effects that look ten times more dramatic, but infinitely less human.

But a piece of film is not easy to fake. I'll have to scan in the footage onto an unexposed roll of film. It'll legit takes me more time to fake it than to just make it. That ensured its uniqueness. It'll be irreplaceable.

In other words, everyone can make stock footage with AI. Stock footage is now worthless.

Everyone can reasonable create fictional films. Fiction becomes less valuable.

But you can't create another reality. So, documentary about true stories, even mundane ones, may become more and more valuable in contrast.

Does that mean documentary is the future of cinema?

Anyway, a bit of a rambling this week. If all goes according to plan, we'll have another video out this week. I'll see you soon!