A Moral Imperative To Articulate Our Path

"I think there is a moral imperative to articulate our path towards something better. Not to leave it a vague post-modernist muddle. Not to shirk from the complexity and realities of costs. And not even to expect everyone to consent."

I was catching up and reading Kevin Kelly's great blog The Technium. Although his post "The Missing Near Future" was about this world in general and all the various problems facing us, it is equally true about the state of independent film worldwide.  His quote above could be our  new mantra: we have to all articulate a plan.

Read Kelly's NYTimes Mag article from 11/24/08 "Becoming Screen Literate" where he futurecasts the requirements and results of a world awash in screen ubiquity.  I particularly look forward to image data search he sees a few years away:

With full-blown visuality, I should be able to annotate any object, frame or scene in a motion picture with any other object, frame or motion-picture clip. I should be able to search the visual index of a film, or peruse a visual table of contents, or scan a visual abstract of its full length. But how do you do all these things? How can we browse a film the way we browse a book?

There's a lot of effort going on to blaze the path into the new future for film.  I would have loved to have attended the MIT "Futures Of Entertainment" Conference.  IndieWIRE ran a good story on it, focusing particularly on the "collaborative filmmaking" movement that they have also covered well in the past.