OK so this is me working out my thoughts on piracy as I go. The previous post, (VIKING ATTACKS) which is well worth reading, talks about music and the way that pirate recordings on the internet can encourage you to seek out and buy new things that you would not have otherwise fallen in love with. It also talks about how Spotify (who aren’t sponsoring me but should be) can act as a brilliant replacement to a radio industry which has been crippled by mediocrity.

However music is very different to film and so piracy has a very different effect. I’m probably going to sum this up at the start of the next post but for those of you interested, I’m going to explore the idea because it means a lot to me.

When we started out on Shooting People’s first ever Mobile Cinema we were regularly told that we were proving that film was the new rock music. We were a band on tour, we had the battered bus and the nightly routine of set-up, gig, dismantle, piss-up that goes with it.

But, whilst this was a great line to drink to, it never felt especially true to the bunch of us in the van. I still feel that what we learnt on the Mobile Cinema was a unique lesson in why so many films (short, feature, fiction, documentary, the lot) are so bad at really reaching an audience.

The film industry is not set up to reach out to people. As a band it’s expected of you to play gigs, to find an audience, to bring your work to them. As a filmmaker the norm is to make your work and then throw it out into the world and wait with growing fury and frustration for the money and applause to come back to you. Screening films night after night up and down the country taught my brother and me some important lessons about making films people actually want to see, not just those we want to make.

Mobile Cinema crowd on a Houseboat in Shoreham

Mobile Cinema, ready for action.

However, we were lucky because though we did show one of our films (OK and occasionally more than one when things got very drunken) we were able to draw on a catalogue of work made by the entire Shooting People community. We were lucky to be at the helm and learn the lessons at first hand, but this is not something that it’s easy for every filmmaker to do.

In the five years since the first Mobile Cinema most of the filmmakers whose work we screened have only made, at most, two more films. It just takes… time. As a result the gig circuit is never something that individual filmmakers are going to be able to get stuck into.

Free music on the internet can draw audiences to buy albums – more importantly it can shift gig tickets. Increasingly this is the way the music industry works. Which is why we’ve seen the shift in importance from “new” music to the, one time utterly unthinkable rise of “nostalgia” bands. Today real money in music is not in selling records by the latest thing, it’s selling tickets to see a band you thought you’d never get a chance to see again.

Similarly the internet is full of comedy. For instance, here’s a clip of my mates Tom and Gemma…

Stand-ups, sketch shows, new talent all quite happy to give their best lines away for free because they know that this is a sure fire way of encouraging audiences to pay to see them live, they know that a couple of million hits on youtube can open the door to a TV commission.

In both cases the “free to view” material, which is often also either “pirate” or at least sees no direct revenue returning to the creator, has a knock on benefit. An album is a loss leader on gig sales in the same way that a £5 Harry Potter book helps Tesco sell potatoes.

The problem for filmmakers is that we don’t have anything else to sell.