War of the Words - December 2011
Here I have posted the speech I gave at Campaign and The Huffington Post's War of the Words event 8 December 2011.
Titled The Filmic Future, It explores the way in which moving visuals will shape the future of communications in the years to come.
You can see a summary of the event here:
(Image source: Campaign)
It was great to see graduate Tony Jiang, another open mic speaker , take the top prize against people who had been working in the industry for years.
The Filmic Future
I believe ....in a filmic future.
As the film critic Laura Mulvey once said of film ; Scopophlia and exhibitionism are reciprocal. In short ; We in enjoy being watchedas much as we enjoy watching.
The explosion of film, as a mass cultural medium during the 20th centuryhas heightened our engagement with moving visuals, which have come to permeate every area of our existence.
Film has an undeniable effect on our emotions. Its recent collision with reality makes hard to distinguish between public events and our everyday lives.
9/11, the shootings in Norway this year and the Japanese tsunami are just three of many instances where on-screen footage has been so emotionally powerful that it can be hard to believe that these events have not been staged, for maximum theatrical effect.
The increasing power of film's presence online has already begun to be explored in campaigns such as Google Chrome's 'The Web Is What You Make Of It' and Shelter Box's 'Disaster' trailer.
Both illustrate the ability of film to generate a direct emotional responsebut also highlight the increasing power of the internet as a medium through which we are able to experience events as they are actually occurring in the real world.
If the first decade of the 21st century was one in which we endlessly documented every aspect of our lives with static images, surely the secondwill be one in which moving visuals take that role.
Technology has produced the death of geographical distance; making our friends , media and favorite brands closer .
The proliferation of mobile and the affordability of video technologies has made it possible for anyone to direct their own films, or be the star of their own youtube channel.
The internet has provided endless content and the democratisation of information. Social media has allowed us to share. Up until now , our online identity has been shaped by static photography, now is the time to direct our own image using film.
I believe that if we are to reach out to younger audiences, we need to turn more towards filmic ways of communicating online, and to develop more creative, two-way dialogues with them.
While there may be a danger that my generation, and those that follow it,will find it increasingly hard to have a sense of our own identity,as our every move and online presence is shaped by moving visuals,
Above all , we are fortunate to be living at a period of unprecedentedly dramatic and exciting change. We should seize the challenges it offers. Potentially they add up to nothing less than a chance to reinvent the world.