Anime, Vanilla Ice, and my job

Behold, one of the finest YouTube video I've seen in a while:



What I find so fascinating about this is the ramifications of such projects on my ability to be employed in a couple years. There are now literally thousands of kids, who, because of the popularity of YouTube are going on BitTorrent or Limewire and downloading FInal Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere or Avid Express and teaching themselves to edit. (Similar, admitedly, to what I did in the 8th grade when I dialed in to a BBS, stole Photoshop 2.5, and taught myself how to paste people's heads on other people's bodies.) The talent pool of "editors" is going to be huge. And, it's something, much like musical ability, that certain people (NB - not me!) have a natural talent for. It'll be pretty amazing when some underprivileged girl with an internet connection learns that she's just as good a storyteller as Thelma Schoonmaker or Dody Dorn or me.


On an even larger scale, the YouTube phenomon speaks to the eventual democratization of television -- something which I think nearly everybody can agree is long overdue. When everybody has an almost equal ability to be a content creator, where does the line between audience and producer get drawn? Look back at my post about the people who (for all intents and purposes) "defaced" the 9/11 conspiracy documentary Loose Change with catty comments about the theorists being idiots. How soon before that happens to 60 Minutes? The Daily Show? Rocketboom? It's certainly not hard to do with a computer and basic editing software.

But, back to Under Ice video -- something else interesting is the way anime is kind of becoming a shorthand. You see it on a lot of kid's MySpace pages. It actually leads me to wonder if anime will be the cultural shorthand of the next generation. Meaning, something you'll see mixed into mainstream programs to give an emotional cue (much the way music and color do now).

My angle is, though, as a professional, wondering how this aesthetic will be attainable in future entertainment legally. (I think this is the aesthetic that the kids feel is authentic -- remashed and remixed audio and video.) How are copyright rules going to keep up with this? Will they be able? And will professionally (and legally) created media be able to hold up to the media created on the edge of copyright legality?

Questions aside, I love this video. I think it's a weird little harbinger of the future -- a media universe which, for better or worse, we'll all have to live in.

(You can get a hi-res version here and an mp3 of the remix here)