4 ms·

The point of the video is the page views. One of my philosophies is this - I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are les

The point of the video is the page views. One of my philosophies is this - I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? If my goal is to create an intellectually stimulating video, then I would work on that. While that is a worthy goal, it's different from trying to create a video that has a lot of hits. I'd actually say that for the average user on this site, considering that most of us have university degrees, it would be much harder to create something that appeals to a person who only has a very basic education than it would be to create something that would be appreciated by people that went through the same educational system that we did. It's great to be smart, but that does not mean you should insulate yourself from the human condition. It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think.

unalone 18y ago
I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? They're better because they're lucky enough to be born with greater faculty for comprehension. I understand you not wanting to appeal exclusively to bright people, but don't make the mistake of putting down bright people because they've got something going for them. And you missed my point. You can't go out and easily devise something that will get lots of page views. To quote Roger Ebert, a person in a funny hat is not funny unless they don't know it's a funny hat. Look at the big YouTube "indie" successes and you'll see the the biggest ones are usually entirely unintentionally up there. The laughing baby. The kid playing Canon in D on his guitar. Yeah, they're great videos. But you can't put up a video expecting it to reach a certain threshold. And if you make videos specifically to meet said threshold, you're fighting against greater odds than if you just go out trying to better yourself as a filmmaker. The point I was trying to make, more succinctly, is this. You can't rely on quantity. If and when you get that many views, it will be entirely by accident on your part. The only thing you can control in your videos is quality. And, incidentally, quality means a better chance at getting quantitative views. Quality isn't about "pleasing smart people." It's about bettering yourself through mastering the skills required to make a film. You can go out and make shoddy film after shoddy film and eventually hit a lucky break, or you can go out and try to make your movies as good as possible, and when you get your break it'll be more deserved and, for that matter, attract a better crowd. (When I made my big Harry Potter redub, I got IMs from "fans" for a long, long time. I still do, on occasion. It's incredibly annoying because none of them have anything more to say than "make another one just like that last one," and I've given up on the scene entirely. Later works I've done have attracted much brighter, interesting people, and that's a reward unto itself.) It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. There is intelligence in simplicity. And not all simplicity is good simplicity, either. Don't let that let you think that there's no such thing as quality. There's eating a piece of fruit as opposed to eating a gourmet meal, and there's replacing the gourmet meal with a Big Mac. Both simpler, but with one there's something significantly lost. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think. You're only ever going to understand your own mind to any significant degree. If you become popular, you most likely won't know exactly how you do. If you do understand it, then you'll derive from the experience either a knowledge of a gimmick - "These people love me acting stupid, let's do it again" - or you'll understand it because you're creating a quality experience. It's why the best way of making a good movie is to adhere to your own standards and to focus on making, plain and simple, good movies. Any other way is riskier and will eventually demean you. Quality, on the other hand, always has an audience.
- markessien 18y ago
  I agree with your points, but your points depend on the context. If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films. The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film. Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike. To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not.
  - unalone 18y ago
    If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films. I prefer Beckett and I've lost my top hat, but I'll argue back as to quality. "Enjoyment" is subjective, "quality" is not. To take humor as an example: a fart joke is extremely generic, requires no thinking, and therefore can be utilized by anybody equally. For most people older than 15, this means fart jokes lose their value in humor. It's not that a fart isn't funny, it's just that it's old and it's been used again and again. Compare this to the opening of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find he has become a giant beetle. Yeah, there's an artistic point to be made about him losing his soul and humanity, but MUCH more obviously, here's a guy who's just turned into a bug. The first we hear of him, he's a bug. That's hilarious! It would be less funny if it suddenly became a comedic gag used by everybody, but as it stands it's rare and it's clever. Fart jokes can be clever, but most of them aren't. And, for the record, most surfer dudes are a lot more sophisticated than they get stereotyped as. The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film. No, the problem is that people assume that another person's opinion matters. Fact does - some humor can be argued very formally - but that's not the same as a title meaning anything. I like HBO shows because they allow more freedom to the creators, but I think that Fox's Arrested Development beats the pants off Curb Your Enthusiasm, despite (and because of, in this case) censors, shorter episode lengths, and more restrictions on content. The Arrested Development DVD set contains an episode that's longer, more risque, and with censors removed, and it's less funny. So HBO's format wouldn't work for the show. Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike. Of course. Real intellectuals don't do that. Roger Ebert doesn't do that with movies. Harold Bloom doesn't do that with books. (Bloom does insult lots of books - he hates Harry Potter - but his arguments are based on logic. While I like Harry Potter, his scathing criticism made me think much more about my liking it. I was suddenly more critical and judgmental, and just happened to find it wanting. Bloom dislikes postmodernism, though, despite its artsy airs.) However, what you're doing is responding by saying there are no standards at all, and that's just as heinous as saying that there are predefined standards in given genres. The proper response is to develop your own taste. That doesn't mean disregarding taste entirely. It means deciding for yourself what's good and what isn't. To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not. Au contraire! (Sorry, by the way: you picked humor and music as your two arguments, and those are two things that I spend a lot of time delving into, and I've already got a lot of these arguments rounded out in my head. Hope you don't mind.) Country music is defined by simplicity: the melody is simple, the instrumentation is simple. The lyrics - simple. Jazz music, meanwhile, is inherently complex. It requires a lot of skill on part of the musicians. I've played the flute for over 8 years, and I'm still mediocre at jazz improvisation. Meanwhile, jazz also deals with very complex tempos and melodies. As a result, it's got much more range in style - musicians have got a lot more to work with, and they produce more fascinating pieces. I'm not at all a jazz fan, it's not my style of music, but at the same time I can intellectually acknowledge what's going on, and I like listening to certain jazz artists a lot. I've yet to find a country musician that really does interesting, nongeneric things. I like a few folk artists: Bob Dylan does some interesting stuff with his instrumentation, and he's got an incredibly unique sound; Sufjan Stevens takes folk and minimalism and creates some beautiful orchestrations. I don't have any country artists I can say the same about. The people who listen to country almost all to a T are less diverse in their music than jazz listeners. This isn't because listening to jazz makes you smart. Some jazz fans are pretty stupid about their music. At the same time, though, if you like music for music's sake, and you give everything a chance, you find that certain genres have much more to offer than others. Jazz is one of the most unique in that it shares few elements with any other style of music. Country, on the other hand, is the opposite: it deals with the bare essentials of music style, and so elements of country appear in rock and even in some strands of orchestral music. A local band, Fountains of Wayne (they had the hit Stacy's Mom), has a few songs that borrow heavily from country. When I'm in the mood for that sound, I go to them, because there's nothing that "pure" country has to offer that I can't get from their few songs. There might be more to country than I think, and if so I'd have to judge that other music on its own merits, but at the same time, your assuming they're equal intellectually is hardly right. In fact, I'd counterpoint you by saying that your saying everything is equal is just as much an instance of fencing things out as assigning arbitrary values without thinking, because you're not giving each item a chance to make its case. The intellectual box is very often full of shit, because not all intellectuals think. What I ask is that you don't deny the value of intelligence just because some morons try to fake it. At the same time, don't deny the value of quality to yourself. If you do, you will find that you will churn out items of much lower quality than you are capable of, and the only people that flock to you are the people who agree with you that quality doesn't exist. Then you'll realize you've created just as awful a box as the other camp - and worse, your box isn't creating anything for anybody.

unalone 18y ago

I don't care about pleasing smart people. How are they better than people who are less smart? They're better because they're lucky enough to be born with greater faculty for comprehension. I understand you not wanting to appeal exclusively to bright people, but don't make the mistake of putting down bright people because they've got something going for them. And you missed my point. You can't go out and easily devise something that will get lots of page views. To quote Roger Ebert, a person in a funny hat is not funny unless they don't know it's a funny hat. Look at the big YouTube "indie" successes and you'll see the the biggest ones are usually entirely unintentionally up there. The laughing baby. The kid playing Canon in D on his guitar. Yeah, they're great videos. But you can't put up a video expecting it to reach a certain threshold. And if you make videos specifically to meet said threshold, you're fighting against greater odds than if you just go out trying to better yourself as a filmmaker. The point I was trying to make, more succinctly, is this. You can't rely on quantity. If and when you get that many views, it will be entirely by accident on your part. The only thing you can control in your videos is quality. And, incidentally, quality means a better chance at getting quantitative views. Quality isn't about "pleasing smart people." It's about bettering yourself through mastering the skills required to make a film. You can go out and make shoddy film after shoddy film and eventually hit a lucky break, or you can go out and try to make your movies as good as possible, and when you get your break it'll be more deserved and, for that matter, attract a better crowd. (When I made my big Harry Potter redub, I got IMs from "fans" for a long, long time. I still do, on occasion. It's incredibly annoying because none of them have anything more to say than "make another one just like that last one," and I've given up on the scene entirely. Later works I've done have attracted much brighter, interesting people, and that's a reward unto itself.) It does not mean that simple pleasures are somehow lesser pleasures. There is intelligence in simplicity. And not all simplicity is good simplicity, either. Don't let that let you think that there's no such thing as quality. There's eating a piece of fruit as opposed to eating a gourmet meal, and there's replacing the gourmet meal with a Big Mac. Both simpler, but with one there's something significantly lost. If you can make a video 500.000 or more, it means you understand the how a lot of people think, and this is more important than understand how people very similar to you think. You're only ever going to understand your own mind to any significant degree. If you become popular, you most likely won't know exactly how you do. If you do understand it, then you'll derive from the experience either a knowledge of a gimmick - "These people love me acting stupid, let's do it again" - or you'll understand it because you're creating a quality experience. It's why the best way of making a good movie is to adhere to your own standards and to focus on making, plain and simple, good movies. Any other way is riskier and will eventually demean you. Quality, on the other hand, always has an audience.

markessien 18y ago
I agree with your points, but your points depend on the context. If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films. The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film. Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike. To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not.
- unalone 18y ago
  If I have some wine sipping Kafka reading man in a top hat telling me that the things he likes are the definition of quality, he's no more right than the surfer dude who swears by fart films. I prefer Beckett and I've lost my top hat, but I'll argue back as to quality. "Enjoyment" is subjective, "quality" is not. To take humor as an example: a fart joke is extremely generic, requires no thinking, and therefore can be utilized by anybody equally. For most people older than 15, this means fart jokes lose their value in humor. It's not that a fart isn't funny, it's just that it's old and it's been used again and again. Compare this to the opening of The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find he has become a giant beetle. Yeah, there's an artistic point to be made about him losing his soul and humanity, but MUCH more obviously, here's a guy who's just turned into a bug. The first we hear of him, he's a bug. That's hilarious! It would be less funny if it suddenly became a comedic gag used by everybody, but as it stands it's rare and it's clever. Fart jokes can be clever, but most of them aren't. And, for the record, most surfer dudes are a lot more sophisticated than they get stereotyped as. The problem with a lot of modern society is that people tell us what we're supposed to regard as high brow - because a film is made by fox searchlight does not mean it's qualitatively better than a nollywood film. No, the problem is that people assume that another person's opinion matters. Fact does - some humor can be argued very formally - but that's not the same as a title meaning anything. I like HBO shows because they allow more freedom to the creators, but I think that Fox's Arrested Development beats the pants off Curb Your Enthusiasm, despite (and because of, in this case) censors, shorter episode lengths, and more restrictions on content. The Arrested Development DVD set contains an episode that's longer, more risque, and with censors removed, and it's less funny. So HBO's format wouldn't work for the show. Intellectualism - our constant attempt to break through the limits of human thinking - seems nowadays to have built a fence around itself and defined what belongs in and what does not. That's what I dislike. Of course. Real intellectuals don't do that. Roger Ebert doesn't do that with movies. Harold Bloom doesn't do that with books. (Bloom does insult lots of books - he hates Harry Potter - but his arguments are based on logic. While I like Harry Potter, his scathing criticism made me think much more about my liking it. I was suddenly more critical and judgmental, and just happened to find it wanting. Bloom dislikes postmodernism, though, despite its artsy airs.) However, what you're doing is responding by saying there are no standards at all, and that's just as heinous as saying that there are predefined standards in given genres. The proper response is to develop your own taste. That doesn't mean disregarding taste entirely. It means deciding for yourself what's good and what isn't. To give an example, those wine sippers will overwhelmingly tell say that Jazz is a more intellectual musical form than country music. Utter bullshit, they are intellectually equal, one just happens to be inside the intellectual box and the other is not. Au contraire! (Sorry, by the way: you picked humor and music as your two arguments, and those are two things that I spend a lot of time delving into, and I've already got a lot of these arguments rounded out in my head. Hope you don't mind.) Country music is defined by simplicity: the melody is simple, the instrumentation is simple. The lyrics - simple. Jazz music, meanwhile, is inherently complex. It requires a lot of skill on part of the musicians. I've played the flute for over 8 years, and I'm still mediocre at jazz improvisation. Meanwhile, jazz also deals with very complex tempos and melodies. As a result, it's got much more range in style - musicians have got a lot more to work with, and they produce more fascinating pieces. I'm not at all a jazz fan, it's not my style of music, but at the same time I can intellectually acknowledge what's going on, and I like listening to certain jazz artists a lot. I've yet to find a country musician that really does interesting, nongeneric things. I like a few folk artists: Bob Dylan does some interesting stuff with his instrumentation, and he's got an incredibly unique sound; Sufjan Stevens takes folk and minimalism and creates some beautiful orchestrations. I don't have any country artists I can say the same about. The people who listen to country almost all to a T are less diverse in their music than jazz listeners. This isn't because listening to jazz makes you smart. Some jazz fans are pretty stupid about their music. At the same time, though, if you like music for music's sake, and you give everything a chance, you find that certain genres have much more to offer than others. Jazz is one of the most unique in that it shares few elements with any other style of music. Country, on the other hand, is the opposite: it deals with the bare essentials of music style, and so elements of country appear in rock and even in some strands of orchestral music. A local band, Fountains of Wayne (they had the hit Stacy's Mom), has a few songs that borrow heavily from country. When I'm in the mood for that sound, I go to them, because there's nothing that "pure" country has to offer that I can't get from their few songs. There might be more to country than I think, and if so I'd have to judge that other music on its own merits, but at the same time, your assuming they're equal intellectually is hardly right. In fact, I'd counterpoint you by saying that your saying everything is equal is just as much an instance of fencing things out as assigning arbitrary values without thinking, because you're not giving each item a chance to make its case. The intellectual box is very often full of shit, because not all intellectuals think. What I ask is that you don't deny the value of intelligence just because some morons try to fake it. At the same time, don't deny the value of quality to yourself. If you do, you will find that you will churn out items of much lower quality than you are capable of, and the only people that flock to you are the people who agree with you that quality doesn't exist. Then you'll realize you've created just as awful a box as the other camp - and worse, your box isn't creating anything for anybody.