A creative partner of mine and I put together a short animated film in Flipbook early this year, and posted it directly from Premiere onto YouTube. (It was part of an on-line video/animation contest.)
The film - animated - doesn't use pencils or paper. The basic layer is a scan of a painting, with some creative dissolves and sound effects. Only 40 seconds long, and an abstract, nearly avant-garde experiment, which animation seems to do better than any other format.
There's no film print of this, indeed there are no drawings. We have the original computer file, which, by dint of being available on YouTube, is available to anyone with a computer. Access to the film is free of charge, infinite, unmanaged and unmanageable. This is called "multipliable on demand" (MOD to those into acronyms, and suggests there's no need to "archive" this film further).
As long as it's available on the net (and this posting creates a second download to view), its current accessibility seems to render back-ups irrelevant. As long as short work like this is intended and designed to be consumed exclusively on-line, casually, and fleetingly, no analog or physical version is needed. A high-quality original is not required.
So, am I done? Isn't the internet more robust than my hard drive, which will be replaced or crash in a couple years? Or the dvd-r I burned it to, which will also soon become lost or fail from age?
This seems a daring gamble on how we'll consume and keep information in the future.
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