Business columns may swell with lusty talk of future online delivery models, from the few to the many, but this neglects one of the greatest things about the internet – it’s remarkable capacities for allowing people to creatively collaborate with each other.
A Swarm Of Angels
Calling itself ‘Remix Cinema’, the Swarmers are hoping to leverage the networks to fund, make, and distribute a £1 million film. Participants are sought to be involved on all levels – to be ‘part of a giant media experiment’ and be part of ‘active entertainment’. Or it can just be downloaded when finished, shared freely and even remixed with it’s creative commons licence, utilised to make your own media. They’ve got a podcast going to keep the project news updated, the last episode presenting a ‘moodcast’ – tracks chosen to evoke visual cues and the general atmosphere of the first part of the script. Recent additions to the team include a new director of photography, Grant Gee ( feature-length music documentary on Radiohead, Meeting People is Easy ) and The Kleptones as soundtrack producers and consultants ( remix albums : ‘A Night At The Hip-Hopera’, and ‘Yoshimi Battles The Hip Hop Robots’ ).
“In our productions, we enjoy the thrill of taking disparate musical worlds and creatively colliding them, so the prospect of being part of such a large collision is electrifying. We…look forward to kicking out the virtual and actual jams within The Swarm.†– The Kleptones
Nothing So Strange
The makers of this documentary-style drama about the assassination of Bill Gates, are releasing their film on an “open source” basis, under a license that allows all of the “source” footage of the movie to be used without restriction, in personal or commercial projects, but keeps the actual film as created by the filmmaker under copyright. “You have free access to all the parts of the movie,” said Flemming. “But you can’t just copy our version of it–you have to make your own original work with the various parts.”
Outfoxed
Also under a remixable Creative Commons licence, is this documentary about the political biases of the Fox TV network in the states made by Brave New Films – who further claim to be ‘in the early stages of creating a network of volunteer field producers’. Free to download : 48 minutes of interviews here in a slew of high resolution formats.
Now The Movie
Latest news from this ambitious UK venture is that music from Cold Cut’s recent Sound Mirrors album is being used in the film sound track. While they ‘can’t know exactly how this will work’, they do aspire for ‘an exploration of what open, collaborative cinema could be!’ and offer profit-sharing for users whose contributed clips end up in the finished feature film.
The Echo Chamber Project
Another open source, investigative documentary – this one about how ‘the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq’. Nicely though, they’ve also developed collaborative techniques for producing this film, in an effort to try and generate some solutions for incorporating a broader range of voices and perspectives into the mainstream media.
1000 Journals
An ongoing, collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels, which is apparently enough ink and various substances smeared on paper that it deserves it’s own documentary.
Carp Caviar Vlog Remix
Video Bloggers are long used to filling pipes with their own pixels, but the efforts and momentum behind this quirky remix project make it well worth a look.