FUTURE PROOF

Timeless.

People, the expression of self and the interactions between each other are timeless qualities relevant to creativity, no matter what the future holds.


FUTURE PROOF from The DMCI on Vimeo.

iFuture

What is good advice for teenagers today who want to make and direct movies?

My answer on :

In 2004 I had been given the opportunity to cast the leading child actress in ‘The Fall’ , a film by Tarsem Singh and presented by David Fincher and Spike Jonze. The story of the film is closely connected with the history of the motion picture and the beginnings of Hollywood.

I spent a long period of time studying and researching how films were produced at the beginning of the 20th century to have a better understanding whilst auditioning hundreds of children for the role. After a while I realised, in that moment in 2004, it was not a journey into the history of cinema or the tireless weeks spent audition children, but it was my first journey into the future of film. How can you better predict the future of film than asking the people that are going to live and shape it?

The idea of discovering raw and pure talent and helping them break into the film industry made me think; how do I multiply the success of one and all the young people breaking through?

In 2004 everything seemed to be impossible, but in 2005 the first YouTube video was uploaded and Facebook had just been launched, evolving from its early beginnings in a Harvard dorm room. In the next year ‘The Fall’ was released and I began the biggest adventure of my life. A journey of building a system that every teenager and young person could create his or her own movies and discover their talent through the process of filmmaking.

As with the case of human communication, using Facebook and Twitter, people can connect so easily with other people. We need this same algorithm for filmmaking. Where filmmakers and those who are interested in film can easily connect with one another and produce pieces of work that are far beyond anything they can dream of, through this collaboration.

My project is now is at the end of its development stage after 5 years in the making. In this time I was interviewing, working and experimenting with over 10,000 children and teenagers; asking them all what they thought about the future of film and where they believed it would take them. We taught ourselves through writing scripts, discovering ideas and experimenting with how to tell these stories. During this process I realised the future of film will not be only a way to entertain but it will be a new way of communication, a new way of collaboration and a new model of production. So my advice to teenagers in breaking into Hollywood starts with self-discovery and self-learning. The film you want to make is within you, you need to know your story and to learn the language of film to understand fully the movie you want to make.

• Tell a story, this is the essence of cinema. Think about a story that has a profound effect on you, a personal story that’s comes from inside. Because that’s what you can offer, a personal vision of the world. But always remember to believe and love your story.
• Develop technical skills. Learn how to master technology and make the technology work for YOU. There is no excuse for not making a good film, there is so much technology available today and you can get it very cheaply and it’s available to almost everyone, so experiment with it and make it work for you.
• To learn the language of film must be a state of mind. You have an amazing resource that previous generations didn’t have. Wikipedia, YouTube, the Internet in general is a huge library of references to use at your disposal. USE IT. Here are some examples: http://vimeo.com/filmschool http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Mov... http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/F...
• Build a strong aesthetic taste. Visit museums, watch films, study painting. What else are films but moving pictures and moving paintings? My tip is to study all areas of art culture and design. Try to create a beautiful visual movie that is personal to you. The more visual you are the more successful you’ll be. Our culture is almost completely visual so it’s is vital to immerse yourself in visual culture in every way.
• Filmmaking in today has the tendency to focus on the lone artist. We can write the story, film, edit and distribute all individually, yes. But the beauty and power of filmmaking and cinema comes from collaboration, when people from different backgrounds come together and unite to tell a story. Always be in a team; always search to be in the best teams because in this collaboration you can be influenced and become the influencer to many people, always becoming stronger and stronger storytellers.
• Try to find a mentor, if you cant meet them in reality then follow them on social media. Here on Quora, JJ Abrams is contributing to the feed. It’s amazing that people can be in contact with the best directors and filmmakers in the industry so easily, so use this as a tool for research and learning. Its great for both sides too, as a young filmmaker, you could possibly inspire and influence already established Hollywood filmmakers.
• And remember don’t worry if you don’t break into Hollywood. Making films is a way of knowing and discovering yourself. The stories you tell come from a deep part of your subconscious, so it is important to express this. I used to keep journals so probably if I found them today they would make an interesting book. So keep making stories, keep filming them and perfecting your craft; one day they will be the best films of your life.

Join Quora and read more answers from JJ Abrams (Producer - Lost, Super 8, Mission Impossible III), Neal Edelstein ( Producer - Mulholland Drive, The Ring ) and many other filmmakers http://www.quora.com/Breaking-into-Hollywood-1/What-is-good-advice-for-teenagers-today-who-want-to-make-and-direct-movies

Future of connectivity

" Collective consciousness taps into intuitive, even spiritual connections, among people. While this reaches deep into what Western minds are challenged to explain, increasingly more people are open to other ways of knowing. This openness to collective consciousness may be emerging in a secular society that is searching for meaningful contributions and relationships. "
Board of Governors, Institute for Alternative Futures , 2006

Serendipity

" The idea of serendipity explains the coincidences that scientists like to refer to explain away anything that would ruin theories or ideas they oppose. Serendipity is the convergence of separate things or forces due to some force of attraction such as harmonic resonance or stochastic resonance. It can explain why two or more people can have the same idea or concept even though widely separated from each other and having no other communication between them. It also explains why pieces of a complex picture come together simultaneously or why there is such a thing as self-organization out of chaos.

Coincidence is a catchword that is used to dismiss things that are actually connected and interrelated. Coincidence assumes two separate and random events may or may not occur simultaneously. There is no pattern other than randomness and chaos. Rising world temperatures and increasing carbon dioxide levels due to human activity has actually been called a coincidence. Only recently have scientists taken another look and are starting to see convergence instead of coincidence. Part of the evidence that has convinced them, is the findings of paleoclimatology. The strange piece in all of this is that carbon dioxide has been known for a long time to be a greenhouse gas. Yet, many scientists have staked careers on the idea that rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures in the Earth's atmosphere are unrelated, merely a coincidence that could as easily not have happened. But this relationship is not a serendipitous one. It is a cause and effect relationship that is well understood.

A serendipitous relation is where unrelated events do converge in a single place and time and are not related by cause and effect patterns. Serendipity allows for cross-disciplinary insights and new ways of perceiving and doing things. A good example of this is the discovery of asteroids and comets near the sun using the SOHO satellite. The SOHO spacecraft was designed to observe the sun, but amateur and professional astronomers have seen far more besides solar phenomena. The Hubble telescope too has found new asteroids in abundance. From this, a power spectrum of size distribution has been found that has implications for the solar system and beyond. While observing other phenomena, the telescope revealed asteroids in abundance at the same time. This was no coincidence, but the serendipitous alignment between telescope, target and asteroids.

When looked at as a whole, there is very little that can be called coincidence in the cosmos. Even the alignment of certain stars in the heavens to particular positions and events unfolding on Earth are not a coincidence. The particular inclination of the Earth guarantees that certain events will usually unfold, just as certain star patterns align overhead. The ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Mesoamericans all built cosmogonies based upon this reality that worked for them, particularly in their survival as societies. They went to enormous effort to build structures aligned to the heavens. In the case of the Egyptians, we can't even duplicate their engineering feats today. This is a cause and effect relationship that is clear when nature and society are seen as interlinked.

Modern civilization appears to be detached from nature. We, who drown out natural occurrences with an artificial replacement, can be more readily convinced that certain relationships are a coincidence. We receive much of our information second and third hand and can be easily led one way or another. Once one experiences nature and its cycles first hand, the explaining away of serendipitous events as mere coincidence, is not as an effective argument as to those who's closest approach to nature is the freeway or the TV set. Serendipitous events then, can be described as those that occur in parallel to each other in time. High tides occur just after the moon passes the local zenith. Summer bounty occurs when the sun is high from the southern horizon in the northern hemisphere. The relationships that are serendipitous ones are endless. That which appears coincidental, is the result more to do with ignorance than with randomness.

Randomness and chaos are aspects of the same phenomena. Revelations in the study of chaos have revealed a complex order that follows the paths of strange attractors. Even random events like fractal Brownian motion and a true drunkards walk have an overall pattern. The strange attractor rules even in these domains, though it is a different type than that which rule weather or orbits. Strange attractors can account for self-organization in the complex cosmos. Strange attractors are born from the serendipitous convergence of an environmental differential and turbulence, which is generated as a result of the multi-bodied cosmic reality. The cosmos is so constructed as to guarantee serendipitous events of all types. We in our ignorance often call certain relationships, coincidence when it is not so. "

Source http://www.intimatecosmos.com/serendipidy.html