Wednesday, October 22, 2008

YouTube meets Amadeus (Cont.)

A quick followup to my previous post.

During my channel flipping and subsequent rediscovery of Amadeus, I witnessed something I found rather fascinating in regards to youth/kids and their media viewing habits per say.

My youngest tweenage daughter and I were chatting as I scrolled through the tee-vee channels...she was telling me about how impressed she was by another student's drumming talent....she wanted to know how someone got to be so good at such a young age. I said that some of it could be natural ability, but most of it was because of practice. Anyway, the word prodigy came up...she asked what that was...and I explained...and then she went on YouTube and looked up 'child musical prodigies' or something. And she found a clip of an amazing pianist who was like, 6...and a wicked guitarist who was 8 or something. Then she asked if Beethoven was a prodigy. And I said I believed so, and then mentioned Chopin or especially Mozart. So she 'youtubes' Mozart...which led us to a list of clips from the Amadeus movie.

And here's where it got interesting.

If I'd said: "Let's go down to the big TV and put on the Amadeus DVD," she'd have laughed and said no way. But instead, she clicked on Amadeus movie Part 1, and we watched the first nine minutes of the film. "Cool," she said, "And look, there's more." And she clicked Part 2...the next nine minutes of the movie.

She was totally engrossed...asking some questions, but still enjoying the story.

The clip ended. I held my breath. She said: "Onto Part 3..." and was about to click it when she remembered she had some homework to finish. And off she went to do her math, but her parting words were: "That was pretty good...I'll watch some more 'parts' tomorrow."

That's how the kids take in so much of their media and movies and music and TV today...in 'clips' and 'parts'. And I know that's no big revelation, but it was kinda cool to see the process unfold in front of me.

And my takeway was realizing that the big challenge ahead for us creatives is to figure out how to create stories best told in that manner, make them (that's the hard part...financing the 'making' part), and then somehow attract the kids to our story (on the computer/internet) that's presumably told in 'parts', thus tapping into and hopefully capitalizing on their new-found viewing habits.

Easy peasy...like composing a symphony. Hmmm. Sigh.

4 comments:

Tim T said...

No lie, I just watched the entire director's cut film on youtube, parts 1 to 18. Although I guess 7 was removed because of brief nudity. Stupid.

Anyway, I'm embarrassed to say I had never seen it before, but I suppose the fact that I was glued to my computer screen for the entire duration speaks to the films brilliance. Even with youtube's terrible quality (even in the high quality setting) I couldn't stop watching.

I'm sure I'm going to hear Mozart's distinct laugh when I dream. Amazing film. Definitely picking it up on DVD first chance I get.

wcdixon said...

Thats ok Tim...I woke up in the middle of the night recently and '12 Angry Men' was just starting on TMC...watched it, enjoyed it, never seen it before. We've all got our lists of 'should've seens'...

Cunningham said...

It's interesting to me that serials and chapters and all that are new again. They were the norm when there wasn't any television.

As creatives we don't have to learn, we have to relearn by going back to the old cliffhangers and rethinking them. Fortunately they abound:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53RseJ7ejQU

deborah Nathan said...

They already do this as the norm in Asia where everyone has a cell phone but not tv or dvd players. They watch everything in two minute mobisodes. Entire series are created to be delivered in this way.