In Your Eyes. The future of film?

In Your Eyes from Bellwether Pictures on Vimeo.

Film  Find above an embed for the In Your Eyes which as you can see was written and executive produced by Joss Whedon and directed by Brin Hill.  I'll talk some more about it in the proper time and place, but will offer the spoiler that it's easily in my top five films of the years so far.  Which does rather mean I have to have a top five now.  Um, in no particular order then:

In Your Eyes
Captain America: Winter Soldier
Safety Not Guaranteed 
Stories We Tell
The Broken Circle Breakdown

Maybe?  Dunno.  Given the fact that I've only been to the cinema once this year and I'm not sure what "counts" I expect that's it.  Oh well anyway, the point is that given the variety of films I have seen so far, this is the little one that could and does a lot.

It's was also another one of those surprise releases which are becoming common amongst artists with a following.  Though I'd been following its production somewhat on Whedonesque, I had little idea that it was going to be released this weekend and mores to the point that I'd be able to watch it on the release date.

The process was astonishingly simple.  Visited the Vimeo website, paid via Paypal, the film was added to my "Watch Later" list then streamed it through Vimeo's app on my Roku 3 box.  This service is available worldwide.  No messing about with timezones, no worry about region coding, none of that.  Just sent them the $5/£3.06 and there it was in HD.

Of course without an app in a streaming device and enough bandwidth (eg) me at this point last year, the whole thing would have been impossible and I would have been willing for a dvd release to come soon.  But nevertheless, the ease of this process makes this feel like another paradigm shift, especially since this hasn't seen a cinema yet.

Will it see a cinema?  Dunno.  The point I suppose it whether it needs to.  Like A Field In England and the various Soderbergh experiments before it, we're in the experimental territory what constitutes a film's release.  Unlike those, this is just a pay-per-view release but with the ability to embed the thing, to share its existence, it feels different.