Homegrown Hollywood: An Artistic Choice

Today many TV shows and advertisements try to look amateurish or "homegrown" to emulate what is often seen on the Web. Do you think professional production values will continue to drop, or do you think amateur user-generated content will get better over time? WHY?

There are many instances in which the “homegrown” look is applied in as a means of achieving the amateur view. The idea of this filming method arguably began with the movie “The Blair Witch Project” in which the entire film was shot from hand held cameras to establish a realistic home video appeal to a horror topic to make the topic hit closer to home by making the experience personalized. More recently, the movies “Cloverfield” and “Paranormal Activity” included a home video type of cinematography to intensify the fear for audiences because of its extreme relation to personal experience with similar technology. The more recent updates in “homegrown” cinematography have a digitalized feel to them as opposed to the previous uses of actual video tape. This technological advancement has made the home video tape camera cinematography obsolete. Commercials as of late also tend to show the technology of the day. “E-trade” commercials in particular established a norm of using web cameras to shoot high priced commercials. The commercials typically include an infant either web chatting about the E-trade product or commenting about it on a video blog. The video aspect is exaggerated by having moments when the dialogue and the visual do not match up as to represent a possible buffering issue. The idea of emulating the Web allows the audience to feel more akin to the product being sold or achieve a more personalized fear factor.

I personally believe that user generated content will get better over time, yet I am sure that professional production values will not continue to drop. User generated content will undoubtedly get better as technology continues to improve. Professional production will never be obsolete as viewers expect high quality particularly in movies or television. I believe that amateur user generated content is not necessarily a phase, but an artistic choice that has a specific place and time to be used.