Future of Media Summit Blog

On Sunday I joined about 50 other artists/DIYers/freaks on an abandoned street in the industrial Sydney suburb of St Peters. We were all there to participate in Rocketcar Day Nine, a do-it-yourself "contest" where people rolled-their-own little amateur-rocket-engine powered cars.

I was invited to the event about 12 hours before it happened, so I didn't have a chance to build my own rocketcar. However, I did arrive with my Nokia N95, which is equipped with a camera that can shoot 5 mega-pixel images, and full-motion (640x480x30fps) video. So I shot the entire event: the rocketcars on the starting line, each of the individual heats, and the rather-more-chaotic group heats.

I got home, took all these little movie files off my camera, and dropped them into my copy of Adobe Premiere Pro 2, mixed it up with an arguably purloined audio track, then took my production and uploaded it to YouTube.

The whole filmmaking, end to end, took about 4 hours. And while the quality isn't great - my camera could use an optical zoom, for example - it does fully represent the rather explosive spirit of rocketcar day. Of course, once I got it uploaded to YouTube, I immediately told my friends and family about it - and sent an email to Mark Simpson, the organizer of rocketcar day.

At this point perhaps a hundred people have viewed that video - and the alternate mix I created for those folks who just can't stand Elton John. That's not bad for something that's only been on YouTube for 36 hours; certainly I have never had anything catch on quite that fast. But it caught on because it was salient - important - to the people who were at the event. They'll watch it, and share it with their friends, who might share it with their friends, and so forth. For the folks who participated in rocketcar day nine, this video is the record of their efforts; it is incredibly important to them. For the rest of YouTube's hundreds of millions of users, it matters not at all. So my little movie will never acquire a mass audience. But that's not the point. This isn't about mass communication. This is about reaching a "micro-audience" with content that they find absolutely compelling, and holding their attention for four-and-a-half minutes. That I've managed to do. And I did it all with my mobile phone, my laptop, and four hours of time.

I'm perhaps a bit on the bleeding edge here. But only because I have a mobile handset which can shoot broadcast-quality video. Film editing - with iMovie and the like - is incredibly accessible to a wide audience. And YouTube allows you to share that work globally. So, as these three pieces come together - mobile, editor, and publishing tool - we will inevitably see an explosion of these sorts of "documentaries", aimed squarely at an audience in the low hundreds of viewers.

As there's more and more of this type of programming around, the commercial producers of media will find themselves permanently losing the battle for the attentions of the audience - which will be better serviced with these "micro-productions", directly targeted to their interests.