You push the button, we do the rest
In 1888, George Eastman received a patent for photographic film on a roll.
He had been a bank clerk in his 20s, and became enamored with photography.
As soon as he received the patent, he founded his small start- up company.
Kodak.
Before Eastman, photography had been the exclusive domain of the ‘professionals’.
It was complicated, expensive and difficult to do, let alone do well.
With Kodak, Eastman changed everything. His cameras were simple point-and-shoot affairs, and he took away all the compiicated chemistry.
Kodak went on to become a giant, and it was not long thereafter that millions and millions of people around the world began taking pictures – something that had never happened before.
At least until the advent of small digital HD video cameras.
What Kodak was to photography, Youtube is to Video.
Video was once the exclusive domain of the ‘professionals’ – professional videographers and cameramen, but more significantly ‘professional’ TVÂ producers and studios and networks.
If we look at what happened after Kodak to photography, I think we can get a pretty good insight as to what is going to happen to TV and video after Youtube.
When the ‘amateurs’ began to get their hands on film cameras they were considered with disdain by the ‘professionals’. Snapshots!
The professional photographers of the 1890s and turn of the century spent a great deal of their time and efforts attempting to imitate the great painters who had gone before them. Their photographs were all carefully composed and carefully staged to recreate the feeling and look of great painters, portraitists and landscape artists.
The amateur photographers, on the other hand, simply pointed their cameras at whatever interested them.
In doing so, they unwittingly developed a far more powerful style and approach, and one that came to dominate and ultimately define photography. People looking into the lens, moments a home caught unware (Cartier Bresson, for example); modernity captured and perhaps most sigificantly, in both The Crimean War and World War I, the true nature of war brought home on film – as opposed to the sanitized paintinglike ‘battle tableaux’ that photographers had created since the first cameras appeared in The Civil War.
Now we come to video.
Our TV shows are, for the most part, little more than videoized immitations of those stiff professional portraits – look at our ‘anchors’ (on the news) or our reporters – standing stiff or sitting bolt upright, dressed more like insurance salesemen than any working journalist I have ever met – rigid, or ridiculously injecting themselve into the middle of stories they had nothing to do with. Look at most of our fictional TV shows – sit coms. Is this anything more than cameras brought to a vaudeville stage? Even American Idol? Now take a look at some of the things people are doing with their own cameras at home on their own.
When we teach the bootcamps we have always found that the less prior experience people have in video or TVÂ when they start, the better they do.
Look at the videos that are beginning to emerge on Youtube.  (Admittedly there are billions – at last count 56 billion), but look at the overall arc of the ‘style’ that is beginning to emerge.
The most interesting (at the moment at any rate) is the video footage that is starting to come out of Libya or Syria or from Japan, for that matter. This is real. This is raw. This does not have some stupid reporter standing up in the middle of it. If you want a really interesting exercise, find footage from Iraq or Afghanistan shot by American soldiers on their iPhones… or even better, footage shot by Afghanis or Iraqis on their iPhones. That is real.
The transition from stiff, formal ‘professional’ photography to a new grammar for photography driven by millions of amateurs did not happen overnight – and the transformation of video and TV is not going to happen overnight either. But it is going to happen.
