Most people assume that silent films were silent for technological reasonsthat there wasnt a way to capture and reproduce sound along with the moving image in those classic early films.
Thats a lie: the technology was never a big deal. Directors at the time simply chose, for aesthetic reasons, to embrace the purity of silence.
A horizontal rule would go here, if I had one to spare.
You Look Nice Today is, to me, the platonic ideal of the potential of the internet.
If you cannot please all by your actions and your art, please the few. To please the many is bad.
@Friedrich Schiller
This is the first time in the history of our species that you can reach the entire world on the merits of your ideas. The people decided to make this because they wanted to, because they thought it would be funny. We all get to see it because the distribution process has been so abruptly and violently minimalisied. They didn't have to take their project to a distributor, and argue of marketing demographics and profitability. There's no middle manager telling them that if they were to cut out any of the more subtle skits they'll garner a wider appeal, because they're going to lose the attention of people who won't get their jokes.
Everyone in the world who is into this project can watch it, and they really don't care what the rest of you think. This is the future of art. We don't have to worry ourselves over reaching a sufficient audience, or appealing to a distributor. Who needs a recording contract when you can put your demo up on myspace for free? A twenty dollar hosting account, a wordpress installation and an idea gives you everything you need to reach everyone who might want to read what you have to say. You want to make film? Have you seen the films people are shooting with cell phone cameras? If you can't afford editing software there's open source, or you can grab yourself a torrent and make an earnest promise that you'll pay for your software as soon as you can afford it.
Quality tools have become so cheap and omnipresent that anyone who wants to make something amazing can do it. The only thing you need now is talent.
Mass media has been engaged in a race to the bottom for too long, and I don't think they can keep it up much longer. How many amazing projects can you think of that were cancelled in the last five years, because they lacked network support, or because some producer decided they wouldn't appeal sufficently to the male nineteen to thirty-five year old demographic? (Fox Studios, I'm looking at you). How many programs are on the air right now that no person in their right mind would ever actually want to watch, and that only survive because there's nothing worth watching on cable? How long do you think it can last? How can something that's been made to appeal in a very small way to a very large audience possibly compete with a project that was made to be absolutely transcendantly beloved to a thousand people? With ten projects? With fifty? How about a thousand?
Would you rather spend an hour watching "That's So Raven", or fifteen minutes on Doctor Horrible? Whose DVD are you going to buy?
It doesn't even matter if this Lowest Comedy Denominator paradigm fails (which anyone with the slightest understanding of Darwinian competition can see it must), because it's finally irrelevant to our lives. I don't need some studio excecutive to tell me what I'm going to read today, thanks, I can find it myself.
Who's your niche?
Some people don't have maps!