Having stuck around a day more in Paris after the end of The European Independent Film Festival so that I could mooch around Le Jardin Luxembourg and find out that Lucien Freud is just as much of a fan of dogs as I am, I arrived home yesterday to find a small cross over in film culture had occurred.

Tuesday marked the release by Canon of a firmware update enabling the 5D Mark II to shoot in both 24 and 25 frames per second and it also saw the announcement of the bankruptcy and closure of the New Producers Alliance.

The NPA was founded in 1992 but it is a sign of how much the world of filmmaking has changed that the challenges facing producers in ’92 were infinitely closer to those faced in ’82 or ’72 than those we faced in ’02 or 2010. In 1992 James Cameron had just astonished everyone with the revolutionary effects work of Terminator 2 but digital filmmaking was certainly not a cheaper option to celluloid and there was no online community for wannabe filmmakers, hell there wasn’t even a Film Council. Like our coastline, the landscape of British cinema had withstood decades without change, save a little gradual erosion. Filmmaking was a cabal, a gentleman’s club, the lazy, underachieving older brother of television.

The NPA was an attempt to empower people to make films, a support group to help people navigate and master the byzantine intricacies of an extortionately expensive commercial art form. I was a member for a few years when I first started making films, back when they’d publish a yearly directory of members. These were squat blue books full of typos but which still smelt of authority and my brief listing therein gave my 18 year-old self an entirely false sense of achievement. As time and technology marched on the NPA went the way of all flesh, it stopped publishing on paper and became a website instead; however it always remained rooted in the real world. It was built around physical events, networking nights, educational sessions, things you had to travel to, like films in cinemas. As it began to lose touch with the pace of events it slowly lost its way. What began as a campaigning group, meeting in pubs and plotting the seditious overthrow of the cinematic status quo, ended up as just another organisation offering training.

I will probably offend and annoy many people when I say I will not mourn the passing of the NPA but the cold truth is that its closure neither surprises nor especially saddens me. It’s not that the training offered wasn’t of high quality nor that the people involved were not passionate and dedicated nor individually well aware of the problems faced by contemporary filmmakers at the start of the millennium’s second decade. However as an organisation it seemed determined to give the right answer to what had become the wrong question.

Crucially, some years ago it turned its back on the power of the internet and pulled out its own teeth as a body capable of arguing a case for independent British filmmakers. We did not need another body organising training sessions, we needed an independent voice for producers that could shout loud enough to be heard. In 2010 this voice was never going to have strength without a vigorous online presence the like of which the NPA never had.