We’re trying to make money by making art. It’s been done, but it’s a tough row to hoe. In the past, paintings and sculptures have been commissioned by wealthy patrons. So if a millionaire is reading this, call me at 551-208-4644. I’m prepared to clean pools and bathe poodles if necessary.

Until I get that call, we’re taking on clients at:
http://office.wreckandsalvage.com/company

We’re in production on a couple “viral” videos, and are actively seeking out clients who are interested in producing serialized videos and/or one-off brand-sponsored shorts.

Smart companies are doing this already, but they are few and far between. Most of them are still too mystified by video on the web to reach into their pockets just yet. But they will.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/newtonminow.htm

Your closing statement was of particular interest to me, as a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Link TV. “Hopefully there’s a more elegant solution, one that supports the more provocative, less commercial creators of today before they become footnotes in nostalgic cultural histories tomorrow.”

You and others might be interested in taking a look at some of our content to see a successful non-profit & non-commercial alternative to traditional media, new & old.

Of interest may be our:

30-minute Peabody Award-winning series, Mosaic: World News from the Middle East linktv.org/mosaic
4-minute weekly Mosaic Intelligence Report linktv.org/mosaic/mir
world music videos, rarely – if ever – seen before in the U.S. linktv.org/worldmusic

We seem to assume that good content will just happen. Or that we’ll just take what’s currently on TV and put it online. I know too many technologists to know that the passion we geeks feel for online video is a craving for different stories and ways of communication.

The $300,000 it takes to produce an episode of MySpace TV would easily fund a thousand well-made videos of all kinds of topics. I fear that the funders may have either a lack of creative imagination, or a distrust in letting people experiment with storytelling.

I think AiB and MN Stories are much like public television – there’s an audience, but you have to struggle to keep it funded and supported.

Thanks for shining a light on non-overtly-commercial video projects, Jackson.

The creativity and the human connections are their own reward. Money can often interfere, and necessitate creative compromise or lack of change/evolution.

Alive in Baghdad is a costly operation to run.
Most video – like that created by Valdez (who has a rent-paying day job, as do his W&S co-creators) – costs very little to produce. So it’s unlikely to die out any more than any other form of ‘folk art’.

Chuck has made MNStories for years without payment – and is mothballing it to focus on other projects, because he doesn’t have the energy to keep it going without help.
Not that he wouldn’t have liked to make it pay – he would’ve – but just because you and I know that it’s one of the most interesting video sites out there, doesn’t mean that advertisers are going to care.

Even on the licence-fee funded commercial-free BBC in Britain, the most interesting programming, (particularly documentaries) is relegated to the dark corners of the schedules, while the lowest common denominator light entertainment gets primetime.

This same type of crap is what gets watched by millions on Youtube. (But still, not tens of millions, like TV.) Other stuff just doesn’t get watched in sufficient numbers for it to be commercial.

Whatever the technology, people will still mostly want to relax to crap. OldTeeVee/NewTeeVee – whatever -that much seems obvious to me.

But I hope that people will ALSO be able to choose to see interesting TV more easily. I think this will change when people are able to access internet video via the living room TV. I’m sure that the average person will want to relax, watch and share with their family on their couch much more than they do on a computer.

Maybe new advertising methods, greater audiences and better tracking data will allow independent artists to get a few $ from long-tail views of their videos. This is something that lots of non-mainstream artists have never have had access to until now. But for it to happen, we’ve got to get more people watching overall. And perhaps the real numbers won’t come until we’re all on TV again.

Strange how the web so often makes me feel like Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football Lucy’s holding.

I’ve been grappling with this for the last couple of years, taking as my initial target science & engineering entertainment for children. Here, there are vested interests in maintaining a supply of inspired students – namely academia and, to some extent, industry – and the challenge lies in convincing them of two things:

Firstly, that there’s value, utility, and potential in factual entertainment media targeted at schools, students, and families. And secondly, that they can no longer blithely assume the BBC’s looking after their best interests, and therefore they must take matters into their own hands.

We’re having some luck with the first part, with a modest consortium of backers funding http://www.planet-scicast.com as a sort of extended pilot or prototype of what I ultimately have in mind; there are signs of movement on the second part.

But it’s slow going, and sometimes it seems like we’re feeling our way cautiously rather than diving in headlong. One of the challenges is that, within its comfort zone, ‘old media’ was surprisingly agile and dynamic; in contrast, I find working in the British public sector like wading through treacle.

But hey, we’re trying, and we’re learning. We’re also making some fun and informative films along the way, and getting teenagers crafting video is an absolute blast. If we can make it all stick, we’ll end up with similar levels of impact to the old children’s science TV series I made, for about 25% of the spend.