◡◶▿ UPV Film Predictions for 2024

🧙 Fincher. Swinton. Citarella. Draper. Safdie. Safdie. Boonmee. Crump.

Thirteen years have passed since I last wrote an annual predictions list - and time has shown that list to be deeply, deeply inaccurate. So, let’s try again! This time for a whole new year. They’re calling it “2024.”

But first: 2023 has been a big year at the Unfound Peoples Videotechnic. A year in which we began emailing weekly micro-essays across extended themes. Capsule courses across semester-long modules. Sensible sequences of extracts from a greater work: the ultimate, and perhaps infinite, filmmaking manual.

Perhaps you would like to revisit those classes. And study the ones you missed. You can find an annotated index of links to each of this year’s programs here:

• Advanced Amateury | How to be better at being worse: clumsy loving in the age of competent content.

• Something About Sound Design, Gardening, and Mutants | How to control sound, and how you can never control sound.

• Rotting the Image | The odour of a film’s look.

Probably, you know somebody who would like to know about that! Please forward them this email, or a lesson you think will resonate with them.

If you’re new to UPV, please note that we are between semesters right now. Today’s email is of a different structure and nature to our regular, term-time emails - which look more like this. Today’s email is of a different tone. “Tongue in cheek.” I hope you find value in it, all the same.

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2024 in Filmmaking: 14 skewed projections

What the culture and industry of the moving image will bring for filmmakers, cinephiles, and little Gene Draper in 2024.

1. Extended The Killer Universe.
   
   David Fincher’s hitman movie gets the infinite IP treatment.
   
   First up, a 10-episode Netflix series. Each week, The Killer botches another job and has to clear up the mess. By episode 10, the series producers have to figure out how to tie it all up as some kind of cosmic conspiracy. Showrunner: Damon Lindelof.
   
   We’ll then get a parade of origin movies for supporting characters from the movie, starting with that poor Dominican bloke he whacks in the taxi.
   

2. Slow Cinema 2.0.
   
   For now, AI video generation tools are not good at showing convincing movement. Bits of bodies and faces move in their own directions according to their own mysterious sets of physics. Just like the video synthesis works of Michael Snow and Zbigniew Rybczyński decades ago, but with less convincing directorial post-rationalisation.
   
   Well, that’s fine for video art, and grand for students of the UPV! But in the mainstream cinema¹, they prefer to keep beautiful body parts in a more or less consistent time zone with each other. So, the best way to create convincing photorealistic moving images of people with AI is to keep the people very still and move the ‘camera’ very slowly.

   

   Thus, the organising narrative principles of early mainstream AI movies will be “waiting,” “lingering,” and - for the erotic thriller audience - “cuddling” and “sleeping.” Deliciously cautious images conveyed to the screen without so much as a ripple.
   
   For those of a short attention span, don’t worry: the average shot length will be precisely 4.0 seconds.
   

3. The new Bond is chosen.
   
   No, not James Bond. Social media will choose a new aging filmmaker to bond with as a virtual grandparent, following successful coddling campaigns with Agnès Varda and Martin Scorsese.
   
   The smart money is on Abel Ferrara becoming the internet’s cute and ditzy little old man du jour. But it is possible social media will elect someone with more longevity, such as the Safdie Brothers.
   
   

4. Francesca ‘Scorsese’ revealed to be catfishing Marty.
   
   The social media world is stunned when Martin Scorsese reveals he has been the victim of a massive catfishing campaign by a young TikToker pretending to be his daughter.
   
   ‘Francesca Scorsese’ is unmasked as Stacie Crump, a 12-year-old Welsh girl living with her grandmother in a lighthouse in Strumble Head.

   

   Crump is immediately hired by Mattel to write and direct the Fisher-Price Music Box Record Player movie, starring Willem Dafoe and Adèle Exarchopoulos.
   

5. The Human Surge 2.
   
   Teddy Williams feels pretty silly when he realises he skipped straight from The Human Surge to The Human Surge 3 without making “2.”
   
   He hurriedly makes an inbetween-quel, but it’s too late: the producers of the Fast & Furious franchise have opportunistically trademarked the title “Human Surge 2” for the 11th instalment of their high-octane automobile series.

6. Instagrammable sets lure characters back into the movies.
   
   2023 was a slow year for characters. With actors and writers on strike, fictional characters ‘worked from home’ this year - and tempting them back out to work in the movies will be a challenge.
   
   To draw them out of their progenitors’ imaginations, filmmakers need to provide perks that characters cannot access while in goblin mode in the backs of writers’ and actors’ minds.
   
   Expect brightly coloured designer film sets that look good on the characters’ Instagram feeds; flexible plot structures; and a liberal ‘bring your imaginary dog to the fictional universe’ policy.
   

7. Laura Citarella releases a labyrinthine mystery in the form of a six-hour ringtone.
   
   The ‘movie’ is structured around a recurring motif of deciduous conifers.
   
   

8. Mad Men ‘80s.
   
   As I keep reminding people, in 2024 we become eligible for a Mad Men follow-up set in the 1980s.²
   
   Don must confront his estranged family when Bobby becomes an executive at JVC and promises that “no American will ever not fast-forward through an ad break again.” Meanwhile, coked-up 17-year-old skater-boy Gene Draper pitches a big idea he’s calling “Music TeleVision” to the money men at Warner. (Sally is in Rwanda studying the mountain gorillas.)
   
   Glen Bishop survived ‘Nam but he’s not hot anymore.
   

9. Cloned talent unionizes.
   
   Sensing that they’re missing the spoils of recent labour movement victories, nearly a dozen Rory Kinnears and several small bands of Tilda Swintons unite to picket the quirky arthouse horror productions that have exploited them so ruthlessly in recent years.

   

10. Collapse of the Dardennes Cinematic Universe.
    
    Declining box office returns and mixed audience responses lead the Belgian brothers’ epic cinematic project to the brink of collapse.
    
    Many cinephiles will be glad to see the end of this dominant force in world cinema. But what will fill its place?
    

11. More Adam Driver content.
    
    My bet is we haven’t seen the last of the quirky-faced brooder.
    

12. Boonsong Mode.
    
    You’ve heard of the Goblin Mode and Monk Mode lifestyle trends. Well, in 2024, unsociable young cinephiles will adopt the look and habits of Boonsong, the ‘Monkey Ghost’ from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, disappearing into the jungle for several years to mate with spirits, grow all-over body hair, and forget the old world.
    
    Basically, it’s ‘Paris, Texas Mode’ without the dope fits.

    

13. Mubi Trailer Mode.
    
    Purple is the new orange and teal. Gen-Z cinephiles will stay at home dancing in slow motion bathed in purple light looking achingly hip and/or sexy and/or tragic.
    

14. Tár Mode.
    
    Honestly, I’ve still not seen the film, so I can’t imagine what Tár Mode entails. But it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
    

15. The Killer Mode.
    
    Following the collapse of WeWork, Gen-Z gig economy workers will retire to their mansions in the Dominican Republic and live out their days drinking cocktails and listening to cutely apt Smiths songs.

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The real (speculative) future of filmmaking

If you like knowing what’s going to happen in filmmaking before it happens, stick around. The new UPV semester begins on Monday, 22nd January, featuring:

• Weekly micro-essays on filmmaking techniques of our imminent and deeper future(s).

• Emerging approaches to the craft that are far more actionable than the trends identified above.

• Tools both digital and spiritual.

• More sympathetic camaraderie than you could shake a boom pole at.

Wishing you peace and love for the new year,

~Graeme Cole.

(Principal)

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

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1. With the possible exception of Christopher Nolan, who will probably make a film called Proprioception or something using the technique as a narrative device.

2. Nine years will have passed since the finale, which aired in 2015 with the 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial following Don’s autumn 1970 hippie retreat. So it will be 1980 in Mad Men years. Right?