Kevin Spacey’s opening keynote at the Edinburgh International Television Festival has been making waves.
The whole speech is worth your time if you care about (or your livelihood depends) the future of the media industry.
He stresses the importance of talent, new talent in particular, but I want to direct you to this section from Spacey’s talk:
One way that our industry might fail to adapt to the continually shifting sands is to keep a dogmatic differentiation in their minds between various media – separating FILM and TV and MINI-SERIES and WEBISODES and however else you night want to label narrative formats.
Its like when I’m working in front of a camera that camera doesn’t know it’s a film camera or a TV camera or a streaming camera. It’s just a camera. I predict that in the next decade or two. any differentiation between these formats. these platforms – will fall away.
Is 13 hours watched as one cinematic whole really any different than a FILM? Do we define film by being something two hours or less? Surely it goes deeper than that.
If you are watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you’re not watching it in the theater?
If you watch a TV show on your iPad is it no longer a TV show?
The device and length are irrelevant.
The labels are useless – except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers who use these labels to conduct business deals.
For kids growing up now there’s no difference watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game of Thrones on their computer.
Its all CONTENT. It’s all STORY.
It’s the same with words.
This keyboard I am typing on right now has no idea if this will be a blog post, a tweet, a PowerPoint slide, an essay, a newsletter communique, a book or a letter that I am going to print out and send to my mom.
I, as the writer, might have some intention about where these words will go and the container that I might put them into.
My experience from the thousands and thousands I have written is ideas are ideas and language is slowing our ability to grasp what is next.