Through the Pinewood Studios Twitter account, I was made aware of this article at the Guardian about a new campaign which is due to be placed at the start of DVDs and Blu-Rays to convince the "Generation Y-Pay" about paying for their films and musical legally, and not resorting to BitTorrent or other illegal methods for watching or listening to the latest music.
Sadly, I don't think this will work. I have always found these types of campaigns to be next to useless other than to simply to give ad agencies something to do. The current campaign doesn't come anywhere near to bringing young people to the people they want to see, which makes me wonder: why don't film, TV and music studios offer open days? People, particularly the younger generation, have no idea of how much hard work goes into making a film. The entire process is so far removed in documentaries on DVDs and on TV that it is often quite easy to assume that working in the entertainment business is quite cushy. Actors are seen as having an easy life – particularly when you see them walking the red carpet at film premières having been driven up in a stretch limo.
Behind all that glitz and glamour is a work schedule that would drive most office workers to insanity – let alone young people who have still yet to work or have just started working. Everybody I've met, on all levels of the filmmaking business, have worked bloody hard to get where they are. And it makes me appreciate how much work goes into getting a film (no matter how crap you may think it is) out the door and into cinemas and on DVD.
We don't just need a filmed/TV campaign, we need people in the industry to tell these people what it's like to work in it, and show them exactly what goes on to justify their money on seeing the end product.
No, I agree. The “hard work” angle didn’t seem to win over many folks when studios tried something similar a few years ago, either — and honestly, although I never download files I don’t own in some form, the ad campaign made me want to pirate every movie ever made. I distinctly remember, for example, a commercial which featured Ben Affleck and an actor posing as a technician (or perhaps a real technician) berating me for failing to pay for everything I’ve ever watched, and strongly suggesting that downloading movies is roughly the equivalent of stealing old people’s credit cards and then maxing them out, only worse. I wanted to punch them all in the face. I’m sure that making movies is very hard work, but increasingly, as consumers find that even renting films costs too much for them, most people probably aren’t particularly interested in the details.
I would ordinarily suggest that making movie-going a less miserable experience would help your cause here (like, mandatorily forcing theatergoers to leave their small children, electronic devices, and in some cases feet, at home, on pain of death), but I honestly don’t think this would affect teenagers downloading stuff at all. Kids often don’t have much discretionary income and aren’t allowed unfettered access to services like Netflix or the family iTunes account — downloading things off torrent sites lets them see movies they might never get a chance to see legitimately. Also, a lot of torrent sites promote the ideal of an online community, and as ridiculous as that looks to people older than 25, kids seem attracted to the idea. Eh, kids are dumb.
Maybe an online video store might help? If it was really, really cheaply priced. And didn’t require parental supervision. And didn’t transmit files in proprietary formats. So yes, that’s never going to happen.
Perhaps the studios should have a brief period of time in which they only finance period pieces and stories about failing marriages starring Cate Blanchett, until downloading isn’t such a problem anymore. That’ll put the little bastards in their place! NO ROBOTS FOR YOU UNTIL YOU STOP DOWNLOADING THINGS ILLEGALLY, AND THAT’S FINAL.