He won't play your video...
unless it's really really bad!
It's easy to hate the movie-going experience. Unless you're near a huge mall, you have to drive half-an-hour to your local megaplex. Ticket prices (until recently) have been climbing steadily, the snacks are ridiculously over priced, you're subjected to half an hour of ads followed by crappy trailers that give away far far too much of a movie you really don't care about. This is all before the film even starts! No wonder angry metrosexual and Globe and Mail man-about-town Russell Smith hates going to the movies so much.
There's not much we can do about the shopping malls and overpriced snacks (other than sneaking in bulk candy and food from the outside) but is there something we can do about all those ads?
In those good old days before TV movie theatres showed newsreels. In our media cornucopia, showing news in movie theatres would be silly, I for one get all my news from this guy! But I couldn't possibly imagine watching a five minute newsreel about the Iraq war right before Racing Stripes.
But what about other pre-feature options? I was speaking to my friend Sarah and how pissed off she was that she couldn't see any independent music videos on MuchMusic. Much and MTV, like your crappy Clear Channel owned top 40 radio station, have a pretty strict list of videos on heavy rotation. Combine this with all those full length shows (Cribs, Pimp my Ride, etc.) and it translates into fewer and fewer videos being shown.
Heck, if I was a large soul-sucking media corporation I'd figure out some crazy deal with the people distributing my film to show some of my "up and coming artists" before a movie. Just imagine; alterna-indie-rocker wannabe, or the next Avril Lavigne before a teen flick. What about a sensitive, piano playing crooner before something vapid like.... Love Actually?
This doesn't solve the problem faced by indie musicians who want to distribute their videos. Just where do we show our made-at-home shot by a film school grad on a DV cam and filled with our friends and family video? There are options like this. It's not MuchMusic, but who wants their video played next to the new Jennifer Lopez anyway?
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