Drumbeat/Challenges/webmademovie

Title

A Movie About The Web, By The Web
a collaborative documentary illustrating how the open web has changed and is changing our world.

Background

Brett Gaylor [(Rip! A Remix Manifesto]) and Henrik Moltke ([Good Copy Bad Copy]) are developing a documentary project investigating the social effects of the World Wide Web. The goal is to show how the web builds real communities.

Description

An overall "umbrella project" will begin on OpenSouurceCinema.org to host a series of episodes profiling communities that illustrate the community-building power of the web. These will be built collaboratively using the task-based system of Open Source Cinema - each episode will be built in a participatory manner.

The project will be bootstrapped by a team of professional, international documentary filmmakers who will shoot initial episodes and serve as moderators of their respective episodes. They will manage the communities that sprout up around their episodes and bring their own communities. In this way the project will have a pluralized, international feel, and will have wildly divergent aesthetics, processes and perspectives. Just like the web.

The goal will be to keep nimble and regenerative - as Open Video practices and technology evolve, so will the project. The Blue Sky vision would be the creation of a living documentary, a wiki-type experience that can be changed and morphed through user contributions.

Eventually a "fixed" version will be edited together to create a feature length film, which will be toured to international film festivals and broadcast on TV networks and spread to P2P networks in a finished state.

How does this make the web better?

By focusing on what the edges of the network look like, the everyday people, the project will humanize the web and remind the world that the web is their public commons. It will NOT be interviews with web stars and geeks - every day people who are building the web by using it.

Tags

open video remix manifesto good copy bad copy collaborative documentary

Video

Rip trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oar9glUCL0

Good Copy Bad Copy Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9vaQ9Ncmps

Participation asks

• Contributions from working filmmakers
  • Recruited from colleagues, "professional" filmmakers will seed the project with exciting and engaging work

• Contributions from "amateurs" (those who do it for the love of it)
  • photos
  • videos
  • the soundtrack
  • storylines and shoot suggestions
  • edits and remixes

• Funds
  • a loose goal of 20% of the project raised online

Donation Target and Ask

• TBD

Toolset and Platform

• Donations and fundraising using Drumbeat
• Participation, production and distribution on OpenSourceCinema.org

Timeline and Milestones

• Based on Drumbeat rollout

Current challenges and questions

• Film projects are expensive. It needs support from broadcasters and funding agencies, who are typically scared of Open Video
• Open Video technology is immature - need support in developing tools to make a truly collaborative documentary a reality.