From the Sunday New York Times Magazine: The Online Auteurs. Excerpt:
For Kent Nichols [a friend whom I spoke with at the Vloggies the other night] and Douglas Sarine, the question was, What can you
do in a squalid West Hollywood apartment with one camera, two guys and
a ninja? Nichols, who is 30, and Sarine, who is 33, met six years ago
while taking improv-comedy classes at the Second City Training Center
inLos Angeles.
They began collaborating on short films soon after, and in 2003 won a
national make-a-movie-quick contest called the 48-Hour Film Project.
But they never even considered making a serious film.“Going the Sundance Festival route is insane,” Nichols told me
recently. “There are thousands of submissions, and maybe 5 or 10 get
distribution deals who aren’t already established filmmakers. Even the
ones that do well at the festival don’t necessarily get a deal unlessNaomi Watts is in it, pushing herself in a new direction.” While they were taking classes at Second City, Nichols had a day
job in an improvisational children’s theater group and Sarine made a
living as a paralegal and dog walker. Still, every weekend, they and a
dozen of their classmates were out shooting their own films, with
Nichols directing, holding the camera, editing, checking the sound.
Their experiments were under five minutes long, and they made about 40
of them. Nichols sent the best one to a film festival for high school
and college students. He wondered what to do with the other 39, and he
thought it might involve the Internet.Then, last year, YouTube came along. …
Actually, no. Nichols and AskaNinja got their start on Ourmedia, not on YouTube.
There’s more than one grassroots media site, despite what Big Media is telling you.
Related: AskaNinja DVD release party in Los Angeles on Dec. 5.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply