Documentary

Abstract

A series of documentary shorts, focused around themes, that convey our mission to the uninitiated and highlight the fact that Mozilla is a public-service organization devoted to building and protecting the open internet for users around the world.

These videos will be targeted to our fundraising efforts, and ideally to key releases of products such as Firefox 4.

Style

Each video will be a 3 minute exploration of a theme, ie "History", "Manifesto", "Future", "Threats", "Movement".

Formally, the videos will be a simple mixture of one-on-one, personal interviews shot in portraiture style, and colourful vector-based animations riffing off familiar Mozilla art work.

If opportunities for cinema verité scenes can be found (ie software releases, all hands meetings?) these can be edited in to specific episodes.

There would be no voiceover but rather a tightly edited script from interviews/

Contributions

Each episode will have opportunity for the Mozilla community, new and old, to take part in creation. These will be low-barrier contributions - submitting existing photos and translation, for example.

Episodes

Overview

A short (3 minute) video that introduces you to the movement behind the browser. This is the video that will be made available to user who download firefox and used in the year end presentation.

History

A top level history of the Foundation, focusing not on the transition from Netscape but the articulation of the values. Will use extracts from interviews that express people's moment of realizing when they were part of "something bigger", or an emotional connection they have to the project. Sketching out what the community looks like and how it works.

From CN: Also would be good to talk about the Mozilla way of doing things. Building and fixing things through a distributed, global community. When did that start to take shape? How did the Internet make this kind of work possible? What has it inspired?

Key interviews: Brendan, Mitchell, Blizzard, Shaver, Beard, Beltzner, Brett, Bob, Billy, Bender, Choffman, Aza Dotzler

Manifesto

Drilling into the Mozilla Manifesto and what the project stands for, what the world would be like if Mozilla did not exist, what happens if we win, what happens if we loose. A charting of what we stand for and why it's worth fighting for and gathering a movement around An explanation of how we work - 17 year olds side by side with internet veterans, IRC, meritocracy, Chaords.

New interviews (not previously mentioned) : Surman, Gandalf + Gorjan, Satoko, Guillermo, (plus others from other episodes)

Future

A more detailed fleshing out of the future as imagined by Mozilla - one where users are in the drivers seat, the Internet continues to be decentralized, transparent, international - and what those things can mean on a practical level. This is an obvious place to bring in Drumbeat and some concrete projects that have been supported - interviews with Nicholas and Dean, John Britain, Pippa and Philip Schmidt and myself, ideally any other promising projects that materialize before the end of the year. New interviews: Pascal, (plus others from other episodes)

Threats

A look into a dystopic future where much of what we take for granted is gone, replaced by walled gardens, centralized authority, and not one but many internets. Those who want freedom need technical skill, closed countries operate their own internal network, and innovation in the online space is sharply curtailed. Not a "calling out" of bad actors but an articulation of some real and present dangers.

Key interviews: Henrik, (plus others from other episodes)

Movement

How can people contribute to the project beyond using Firefox? How do the small contributions play a role? What is our goal for the "next million Mozillians" - if the boy scouts and red cross can do it, why can't we?

A first teaser

It may be that before the episodes, we need to create a video that simply explains what Mozilla is in a past-paced 2-3 minute clip, drawn from material that will eventually make up the more detailed episodes.

Distribution

I would love to see this videos embedded on a page where users download Firefox. The "teaser" video mentioned above embedded on a page, with a link to another page on mozilla.org that lists each individual episode.

Each episode will take advantage of Web Made Movies, so playing the video will trigger events in the page for further reading, examples, mailing lists, etc - so people can take action right away when the are inspired.

Timeline:

I would like to see a teaser video completed by Christmas - some knowledge of FF 4 release dates might be useful here.

From there, we could imagine a new episode released every month.

Note that animation is a long process and should be integrated from the beginning, but requires detailed pre-planning. This would likely involve rough cuts of the interviews, spaces left for animations, those animations inserted in early form, and then entered in a fine cut stage.

Budget:

Aside from travel, much of what is needed can be done internally.

Some equipment is needed to create a studio effect, ie black backdrop, slightly more high end lights than MoCo currently has, and a monitor.

One highly essentially spend is on proper transcription - we are experimenting with using universal subtitles here, however we may need to spend here. For pieces based on interviews, and where there is likely to be editorial input from multiple stakeholders, a word for word transcript is essential.