Asyouwish/ Jenkins 3/3/09

The very first quote in the Jenkins reading greatly reminded me of what we had been talking about in class. "For me the great hope is that 8mm video recorders are coming out, people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. And that one day a little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father's camcorder. For once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed and it will really become an art form"(Francis Ford Coppola 549). This quote is going along with what we discussed in class on Tuesday about how once cameras and video recording devices were massive amounts of money and thus very few people could afford them let alone know how to use them. Today however video imaging is much easier to get ahold of and use. Almost every laptop and cellular phone today has a program that allows for video recording. Therefore because so many people now have the mechanisms at hand to create a video there is much more competition. Since almost everyone now has the ability to create a film more films go unnoticed and only the truly amazing ones or ones with a famous company backing them are even heard of or acknowledged. The idea that a "little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the next Mozart by creating a film with her father's camcorder" (549) is right on. U-tube videos are created by probably hundreds of thousands each day and many become famous cultural phenomena. Most of my friends have all seen the same videos, one being the "harry potter puppets and the mysterious noise", a film created by some bored people using puppets and which has attracted 59,000,000 plus views. Back in the day this many people would have seen any individual film because it was the only one of its kind and there was no other visual entertainment, thus every video was a masterpiece because it was a rarity. However now because everyone can produce a movie, we as viewers and critics have become more picky as to what we give praise to and do not.