Yes, in many ways, the film industry may become more like the publishing industry. People will be able to make finished films on their own, much like writing a book manuscript, and will submit it to distributors, much like writers do to book publishers. The effects of such a 'paradigm shift' may be similar to what occurred during the Renaissance with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press; book printing & publishing became more of a demotic industry and less the pursuit of a handful of Church scribes. Given, the shift was not immediate and took years of progress to reach the point where a writer toiling in their home could have a chance of getting their book out to a large audience; but, considering the massively faster rate of proliferation of progress, and of today's technologies, it seems like the industry may reach a book publishing parallel - if it does indeed reach such a parallel - in a comparatively much-shorter time. The interesting appeal of such an industrial shift, if it does occur, would be found not only for the independent artist, but also for the scholar; and while some film scholars do make experimental, avante garde, as well as classic-narrative films, the production quality of narrative films suffers in comparison to those industrially produced. It seems probable that a shift in the industry towards the independent artist will also favor a shift in the production value of technologies available to the independent artist. It's only a matter of time before the independent artist will be able to create a film which can compete, from purely a production quality perspective, with those of the studio's. Regards, R. Inglis >Most of it will be >inferior and forgettable, and it'll become even more difficult for shiny >new >talent to stand out from the crowd. The challenge will be the smaller >studios that can help secure distribution, but they'll be spending most of >their time screening thousands of hours of digitally-shot film, searching >for those few gems. They already do that when reading scripts. But at least >now they have a finished project to help make their judgments. Perhaps >they'll even expect a finished project instead of a script? > _________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ---- For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives: http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html