Here I sit, doing programming for a Roku channel that no one ever watches, working on a web page that no one ever views, and writing a blog that no one ever reads. Why do I do it? In the forlorn hope that some day, someone will come along and see what I am doing is worthwhile. Well, in actuality, just one person wouldn't cut it: I'm hoping for a big audience... some day.
But worrying about whether I'll ever get an audience is a trivial matter. There's work to be done: I need to come up with new and reasonably original material. I'll worry about an audience when people start to show up. And in the meantime, when they do show up, they'll have plenty to look at.
As for getting original content on my Roku channel- the whole process of putting something together is interesting. One thing I have found in doing videos is that any music you pick to go with a video is going to be the right music. People will make a mental connection with the music they hear and what is on the screen.
If you have a scene with a gun fight, for instance, you can use fast, erratic music, and people will say that it fits. You can use peaceful, quiet classical music, and people will make the connection that you are making an ironic commentary on what is happening onscreen. Try it yourself: pick any scene from any movie at random. Play that scene with the sound off. Then pick any piece of music you find and play it. It will fit, because the human mind likes to make connections, to make sense out of the world before it.
I've also found that sometimes a film will write itself. What I mean by that is this: in my film "Why Are They Here, And What Do They Want?," I used footage from the Gemini space program for a lot of my special effects. I felt I had to justify that, so I had a line to the effect that "This was a secret off-budget mission, so we had to use old equipment." But I realized I also had a line in the film, "We had enough parts for several rockets..." In other words, the part about secrecy was not relevant-- they had several Gemini rocket parts, so they went with that design.
I remember telling a friend of mine about my idea for a film that was 100% stock footage/public domain footage. "You need to have actors, no matter what," she said. Not if you use the low budget filmmaker's best friend: a narrator. I did have two other roles in the film: a teacher who was "totally wasted," and some aliens. Both roles were done by me, using voice altering software.
On the subject of public domain films, a lot of people don't realized that everything filmed by the government is public domain; none of it is copyrighted.This ncludes all of the footage NASA ever shot, as well as all the cvlassroom films they did. This fact came upp rather amusingly a few years ago.
Someone had claimed to have film of an alien autopsy. The footage was, of course, s00per sekrit footage by the army. The people that had acquired the footage were selling the rights to air it.
Fox news knew about how government films are not copyrighted. They showed the film. They had contracted the people who 'released' i, saying, in effect, If your film is actually a government film of an alien autopsy, it is in the public domain, as it has never been copyrighted, We are free to useit as we see fir. If, however, it is your film and you copyrighted it, you can make a claim against us But you will have to admit that the film is your product, and not a genuine classified film.
What could the people who faked up that film do? Absolutely nothing. They'd painted themselves into a corner.
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