Before you throw me into the the hater camp, hear me out. I don’t hate Ridley Scott. In fact, I admire him a great deal. The man was and is a legend to all aspiring filmmakers who at some point encountered the stunning, prescient piece of filmmaking that is Bladerunner while learning to make films. It was with some excitement that I examined his recently announced “Life In A Day” project, launched in collaboration with the Sundance Film Festival and Youtube.

Below is the video explaining the project, which is fairly self-explanatory: The film director Kevin McDonald will accept crowdsourced video from YOU, shot on a single day, and will create a feature length “experimental documentary” to be shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

On the surface, it seems the focus is to engage viewers, aspiring filmmakers, and create a narrative that ties the globe together in a neat way, sort of like, um…a commercial. At three minutes, Nike’s Write the Future World Cup ad is exactly THAT, only shorter, more exciting and actually ABOUT something. Nike’s spot is a brilliant, energetic, beautiful and poignant celebration of a world’s fascination with a single sport – about how the love for a game can be experienced across cultures.

While I’m not saying that such meaning and profundity as soccer sometimes inspires cannot be found randomly around the globe about other subjects. I just want to know – what subjects exactly? What is it ABOUT, people? I wish these large scale, commercially overblown so-called experimental projects would have meaning, otherwise it becomes a waste of the crowdsource, just another marketing ploy to keep the old school relevant in the new media world, something I referred to in my post about Ridley Scott’s initial foray into this arena, via the (now defunct)Purefold initiative back in November of last year.

Crowdsourced art isn’t about broad, jumbled collaborative initiatives asking everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It should be about taking a point of view on a real subject and hunting down the truth and beauty in an idea, like artists are supposed to do, if they care about their art.

So how about, by way of tribute to the greenback and our indie taste for it, I make a list of films that got the cash in the suitcase? And then…well, maybe how some big ones turned out. Don’t forget that everyone lies about their budget, their marketing and their purchase price but Box Office numbers maybe the closest figures we have to any truth in recorded information.

#5 HAMLET 2

Reported Budget: $9M

Rumored Sundance 2008 Sale Price: $10M

Box Office: $4.8M

My 2 Cents: I actually liked it…but it wasn’t no HSM or Glee – who’s the audience again?

#4 NEXT STOP WONDERLAND

Reported Budget: $1M

Rumored Sundance 1998 Sale Price: $6M

Box Office: $3.4M

My 2 Cents: Rom-Com Indie ? A little more plot and it should’ve/would’ve been a studio pic with a bigger marketing budget.

#3 HAPPY TEXAS

Reported Budget: $1.7M

Rumored Sundance 1999 Sale Price: $10M

Box Office: $1.9M

My 2 Cents: Comedy about two cons impersonating a gay couple in Texas. Can’t remember – was that before or after gay rights stopped being a joke?

#3 CHOKE

Reported Budget: $3M

Rumored Sundance 2008 Sale Price: $5M

Box Office: $2.9M

My 2 Cents: I couldn’t get through it so someone please fill me in.

#2 BLACK DYNAMITE

Reported Budget: $2.9M

Rumored Sundance 2009 Sale Price: $2M

Box Office: $229,000

My 2 Cents: Let’s see: if you’re under 35, don’t know what blaxploitation is, you might as well be watching a foreign film.

#1 GRACE IS GONE

Reported Budget: $3M

Rumored Sundance 2007 Sale Price: $4M

Box Office: $50,000

My 2 Cents: Wow. That’s all I can say. We were depressed as a nation. And thought others might like to be as well.

The truth is, right now, in January 2010 most of the visual storytelling–series, one-off videos and even features you’ll find on content sites (outside of the Netflix and Hulus of the world) ARE independent. That is to say, they were created by individuals who independently decided to create and in most cases finance their own projects. Whether it cost $5 on a borrowed Flipcam to make that cat fall of the piano, or it cost $50K to make that VFX masterpiece that got 1 million views on Youtube, the bottom line is that the idea of the “independent” has gone totally mainstream.

Film and video festivals are proliferating like never before, and the amount of content at online aggregation sites is staggering. Let me put it in perspective: Back in May 2009,  YouTube’s blog said 20 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute and they point out that it would be the equivalent of over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week. Every filmmaker I know rolls their eyes about YouTube stats. So let me be clear: my point is certainly NOT that a video like Chris Crocker “Leave Britney Alone” a filmic masterpiece because it had close to 12 million hits.

Rather, my question is: What happens to “American Indie Film,” largely defined by the self-financed, autonomous creation of filmed stories by a person or group of people- either documentary or fictional, and to be possibly sold and exhibited to the public. Film schools all over the US are filled with filmmaker hopefuls wanting to do just that, and spending a lot of time and money working towards that end. (I know because I went to one of them.) One could argue that the distinction is obvious, and that my argument is at best, semantic. But I don’t think it is.

I know there are a lot of rah-rah traditional American indie filmmakers out there trying to figure out how to bring the whole kit-and-kaboodle of indie filmmaking from the analog/old/Sundance world into the digital age. And there are some wonderful resources for crowdsourcing funding, marketing and distribution evolving from these efforts. BUT, I am going to argue that the idea of American Independent filmmaking as a cultural movement defined by films all the way from the 70s through the early days of  Sundance, is over.

So while I applaud the spirit of indie creators, I’m going to call a spade a spade: most indie filmmakers (and I know this because I’ve worked on MANY indie films) bootstrap their “passion projects” so they can have a shot at the big time: Hollywood. And I’m not knocking this as a strategy. I mean who doesn’t want to get on a movie where you have a Honeywagon instead of your mom’s station wagon? However, let’s not confuse a financial/career approach with a cultural idea called “independent.” There are fewer and fewer filmmakers working outside of the cultural and even political constraints of the mainstream (as defined by Hollywood). In fact, I would venture to say, there may be more true “independent” thinking buried in the vast depths of the billon-deep YouTube video vault right now.

So maybe the moment has come to re-define “Independent Film”. Perhaps what we are really talking about is filmmaking for niche audiences, the same way cable television changed the way we see television. More rarified, maybe, but by no means does any vague set of “indie rules” apply to any work being created  in the “feature” category by a non-studio entity. I think once we get real about what it “means” to be an independent content creator, we can get down to the business of learning one or two things from folks who are having success in the vast world of online media.