Each year thousands of tech savy graduates are pumped out from film and photography schools - none of these people are burdened by the facts of history -
of the assistants I hire worldwide, few if any are fond of video. they studied to be still photographers, that is their goal, for most their passion.
I really thought it would be the opposite, given they have grown up with video games and an lcd in every room, car and hand, but few have a desire to be a video director or shoot motion.
in fact, most haven't really fallen in love with digital and prefer to shoot their old rzs and film cameras given the money or opportunity. yes they all shoot with a 5d or a d something, but given their choice for personal work, they use film.
regardless, technology will make parallel productions available, though it will be the paying clients that either drive video into the realm of print or not. by the time these assistants become full fledged working photographers, or image makers they may be shooting motion, whether they prefer it or not.
right now I doubt seriously if gucchi, h+m, macy's ,wallmart are all ditiching print advertising and in-store and putting up 6 ft. lcd screens and only web based material, but many retailers and manufacturers are selling more and more on the web and a lot of brick and mortar stores have moved their previous catalog money to the web.
as primarily a still photographer, obviously I am biased toward stills as I find something captivating in a still image I don't see in motion. I was shooting in the streets of Hong Kong last week and saw a beautiful print campaign in a store window of a high end district. it caught my attention first for the beauty of the imagery, but secondly it moved as it was linticular printing. it actually moved in a more dramatic way than that james bond red display in times square. I thought how cool, but then again it was more gimmick than substance as the images were strong whether they moved or not.
it is interesting that regardless of where I work or what I am hired to do, the main goal is to produce something visually interesting. last night I had a long talk over dinner with an art director about moving imagery and he agreed that the same disciplines for still imagery do not necessarily apply to motion. most still photographers reels have the look of stills. beautifully crafted but they kind of have the story line of do you like my photograph, hold it, I'll move in a little closer for you to see it better.
successful motion, film or video really needs a story line. james bond turning his head is kind of cool, but not really that impressive given it could have been shot with a dslr at 8fps and let's be honest, is anyone going to stand in the middle of times square and watch a 30 second spot? they might watch a 4 second video but even that is asking a lot of someone on their way to work.
a lot of this falls into the area of gimmick and the advertising world loves gimmicks so he conversion from still to motion might come faster than most of us believe or want.
what I find most interesting about all of this is how the lighting companies especially profoto have been slow to adopt hmi's and continuous sources into their lines. from time to time I rent profoto hmis which are now officially off the market and would buy them in a minute if I could find them, but you would think given the annoucement of the 5dII and the Red there would be hmi's coming out to market daily.
I believe you will see more continuous sources soon.
to me what this really does signify, especailly the red annoucement is medium format better find a way to get their base iso settings higher, whether they go to cmos sensors or not.
if not medium format will continue to be a high light source, or still life based photography tool.
