In the 2000’s, someone introduced me to Coppola’s Law. Coppola’s Law was coined by Francis Ford Coppola, and it held that in film production there are three qualitative goals, good, fast, and cheap, and one could have only two of them at any given time. If a film was good and fast, it wasn’t cheap to make; if it was good and cheap, it wasn’t fast to make; and if it was fast and cheap, it wasn’t good. Although Coppola formulated this theory to fit film, people began to apply it to any endeavor and sure enough, in my own use of it in the past 10 years or so, I have found that it is mostly true: You can’t have good and fast and cheap.

Until now.

Because what has happened now is digital technology.

Oh, we had some digital technology before. But the explosion of microtechnology and superfast processors with magnified capabilities, the expansion of bandwidth, the extension of networks, and the ubiquity of consumer offerings have put more power in the hands of more people than ever before. Put personally it’s like this: When I was a boy, I wanted to publish magazines, record songs, and make my own films, and then distribute all of that to other people. And I couldn’t do any of that. The best publishing technology available to me was the Xerox copy machine — and copies were a prohibitive 25 cents a page. (A small fortune in the 1970s. And a ludicrous amount of money, when one considers that 35 years later, copies are two cents a page.) I could play piano and a little clarinet, and I was able to record homegrown comedy tapes on a handheld cassette recorder, but I couldn’t afford a recording studio. Even when I was able to lay hands on things like a Super 8 video camera, the larger problem lay before me:  how to distribute any of this. The costs of printing and packaging and postage and audio or film duplication were enormous.

But now, in 2010, you and I can do all of that. All we need is a personal computer of some sort — a desktop or a laptop or… an iPhone. For $199, you can produce a film, and you can distribute it for free via YouTube. All the barriers to entry are now essentially lowered.

Take a look at the video below, which was shot, edited, and uploaded entirely from an iPhone 4. The storyline isn’t impressive (I could summarize it this way: old fart bores youngster with impassioned recollection of antique childhood passion). But in demonstrating the storytelling capability of the technology, it’s pretty remarkable. Watching it makes me wonder what the kid I was in the 1970s would have done with this. Because, ironically, now that I have access to all these tools — I don’t have time to do any of those things I wanted to do.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.