The Arrogance of Quality

When I first started making my own little movies, I hadn't ever downloaded a movie from YouTube, Google Video or any other viral website. I didn't have a Myspace account, and I pretty much checked my email once a day and maybe browsed Wikipedia every now and then.

As I started making more movies and growing to enjoy the process, I learned all about video compression, sites that host videos for free, which ones offer the best quality, what each site's individual file size limits are and so forth. I decided early on that I would promote my movies as much as I could--because if I didn't, who would?--and so I have developed a ritual after completing a new movie: I'll upload them to YouTube, Google Video, Game Videos, Game Trailers, Stage6, Machininma.com, Warcraftmovies.com, Myndflame.com and Stormrager Productions.

As I became more involved with the community of machinima makers, I began to run into authors who wouldn't touch websites like YouTube with a ten-foot pole. They never submitted their movies to such websites, and would even go so far as to search them every day for their own movies, and then file a DMCA complaint with the website to have them taken down. Their reasons for doing this were manifold, but the primary one was that streaming viral websites reduce the quality of the movie file.

If you browse some of the movies on WCM, you will find that a number of authors refuse to post their movies on streaming sites, and sometimes go off on rants in their movie description about why their movie is super-cool and why their movie is above ever having to suffer the horror of finding itself on a vulgar viral website like YouTube. I have found that opinions about this subject are sometimes strong and quite emotional, which is something I have a hard time understanding. After all, it is just a movie, and the point of a movie is to be watched. Therefore it logically follows that the best place to put that movie is one that has a large audience. Right?

I was once hired to make a movie. I was doing a conference call with the fellows that hired me, and they greeted me and told me that they liked my movies, "...even if you do put them up on YouTube, lol," they said. At the time I just laughed and I went on to make a movie for them (though I am still waiting for my check!), but this off-hand statement--from fellows who don't even make their own movies--has given me cause to sit and think about why a tool as useful as YouTube would be so hated.

I think I have figured it out. Men love themselves, and want to think that they are unique. They enjoy feeling like they are special, more special than everyone else, more unique than everyone else, and this inherent uniqueness puts them on a level above the vulgar (from the Latin "vulgaris" meaning "common") masses. Therefore, if something is used and loved by the masses, a man must take steps to distance himself from that thing, so that he can maintain his lofty perch of being so spectacularly unique--just like everyone else.

This is why I get so many messages from people who give me a hard time for putting my movies on YouTube. Yes, it is true--I do have to re-compress my file to below 100 MB in order to submit it to YouTube, Game Trailers, Game Videos and a host of other streaming sites. During this process the video is altered and it does lose quality (it is the loss of audio quality that is most regrettable to me). But I still do it, because I believe it is important. YouTube is so incredibly popular that I get more downloads from it than all other websites combined. The last time I checked, my movies have been downloaded nearly three million times on YouTube. Google Video comes in second with just over one million, and WCM comes in third, for I just broke one million today.

From a promotional standpoint, it is crazy to not take advantage of these great tools. From the viewpoint of an author, it is also silly to hate these tools, because the entire point of being an author is to put your work out into the world so that people can enjoy it. Why ignore or otherwise trivialize those tools that help one reach this end, simply because they are popular? It is only when one comes from the viewpoint of worshiping quality above all else that this disgust of a popular medium is understood. This also explains why I get so many strange looks when people find out I have a Myspace for my movies--for Myspace is, of course, so incredibly vulgar.

The author who refuses to release his work via a mainstream medium because he is concerned about quality does not make movies for others, but only for himself. He makes movies to showcase his own video editing prowess, or to demonstrate how intelligent and witty he is, for he is so very far above all the other authors out there. He is better than the audience, for he can only enjoy a movie when it is shown in an absolutely pristine condition, and yet the "vulgar masses" can take enjoyment from a movie even if the quality isn't the best.

I think such an attitude really betrays the entire purpose of the machinima genre. We exist as authors only because there are people out there who enjoy what we produce. I know that in my case, there is no way I would devote the time and energy to machinima that I do if there was no one out there to watch my end result, but it seems that there are authors who are perfectly content to wallow in obscurity for the sake of quality, to humor some self-imposed standard. It is true that being an author is a little self-gratifying, but I would rather choose to be the fellow who is gratified by entertaining others than the fellow who is gratified by humoring only himself any day.