Drumbeat/Challenges/webmademovie
Title
A Movie About The Web, By The Web
A collaborative documentary exploring the power of networks. We´re getting so used to the internet that we no longer stop to think about it. Why we love it. Why we hate it. What it really is.
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 very different people and groups are changing because of the Internet - from everyday tasks, to crime, sex and identity.
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.
HTML5 video and other open web technologies will be combine to create a whole new kind of media experience -- letting viewers and community members mix video, social media and data from across the web in real time. The goal will be to keep nimble and generative: 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 "release" 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. If the community building the film is large and lively enough, multiple releases may be made over time (once a year?).
How does this make the web better?
As it unfolds, this 'web made movie' will:
- Remind the world that the web public commons by focusing on everyday people creating things at the edge of the network. It will NOT be interviews with web stars and geeks - it will be every day people who are building the web by using it.
- Show the creative potential of open HTML5 video by building a high profile participatory project that blends video clips, social media and data from across the web. At both the technical and creative level, it will demonstrate the online video is more than 'tv on a computer'.
- Advance the field of 'open source cinema', pushing the envelope of collaborative online movie by drawing on experience from RIP, GCBC and Mozilla.
Tags
open video remix manifesto good copy bad copy collaborative documentary
Video
Examples of work by the two lead directors can be found here:
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
- Creating core story lines and episodes to prime the pump
- Editing and refining materials into compelling media experience (release version and episodes)
- In a way, the filmmakers become like DJs or curators of the whole experience
- Contributions from "amateurs" (those who do it for the love of it)
- photos
- videos
- the soundtrack
- storylines and shoot suggestions
- edits and remixes
- subtitles and localization
- Everyone on the web
- Participating via all sorts of social media
- Layering on annotations, tweets, images, etc.
- Communities and conversations form around episodes
Content and Episodes
These are drafts of potential epsidoes - the development phase will yield more concrete, character-based investigations of communities. Also, the development process will also include an open source component -- community content will yield new ideas and episodes.
1: The Power of Networks (or, Where Wizards Stay Up Late)
Little is known about the characters who built the networks that would eventually become the Internet – visiting these humble engineers will tell the story of a system based on openness and intellectual curiosity, and the tensions that naturally lead to the Internet exiting its home at the Department of Defense and enter, if not swallow mainstream culture whole.
This section will also explore the early tension between those who worked towards an “open” internet and the existing industrial powers that it posed to disrupt.
2: Creativity
The network has uprooted culture for geography and local tradition, allowing artists to create new fellowships, new territories and new tribes. It has decimated traditional avenues for compensation, while providing exciting new ones. It has made us question originality and plagiarism, authorship, collaboration and “professional art”.
We’ll follow Amanda Palmer, an independent musician who keeps attacking the major label she has as contract with and uses social networking to connect directly with fans.
Launched in 2007, Ravelry is a web community of fiber artists (knitters) that quickly grew to over 400,000 users. We’ll work with the Ravelry community and have them self-document, by uploading videoblogs, create timelapses of creations, and reflect on what networks has done to the knitting community.
We also want to explore how our notions of originality are changing, how “digital natives”, have changed their view of originality and creativity. Are we in danger of losing the ability to create a culture of today? Are we regurgitating? Here I will follow the AV/DJs The Eclectic Method, whose perfectly synchronized audio/visual remixes depend on instant access to the canon of humankinds cinematic and musical output. While each of their mixes juxtaposes and creates a new meaning in the mind of the watcher/listener, is it moving too fast to digest?
3: Identity + Attention – The Digital Native
"Using the latest brain-scanning technology, scientists at the UCLA Medical School have discovered that constant immersion in digital worlds is creating new neural networks in the left front part of the brain (the dorso- lateral prefrontal cortex) that cause digital natives to 'respond faster' to digital stimulation, but it has been found that they also 'code information differently' and “have shorter attention spans” than digital immigrants. Constant and prolonged exposure to digital technology is creating new neural circuits in our brains and weakening older, more established ones. "
Characters in this section will emerge from brainstorming sessions at Open Source Cinema, but will also be informed by interviews with John Palfrey, author of “Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives” and Alea Vit, a digital native herself who runs the Digital Natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center.
4: Knowledge and Power
Iranian protestors used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to circumvent the government’s ban on foreign journalism. But the government used this same network to spy on, intimidate and harass activists. And almost all 21st century dictatorships (Cuba, Burma, China) have taken advantage of the networks ubiquity to spy on citizens and present a filtered view of the world. Consider China’s “Golden Shield”, some 20,000 “internet police” who eavesdrop on the network searching for dissidents. These same police add thousands and thousands of websites a day to a filter (called by some the “Great Firewall”) that prevents Chinese citizens from accessing information considered dangerous to the government.
In this section we will work closely with the anonymous Iranian community at iran.whyweprotest.net .This is the community responsible for publishing the shocking images that the Western news media used to report on the situation in Iran. And we will document the triangle of Chinese police eavesdropping, Google collaborating with the Chinese government, and Chinese activists trying to communicate information
5: Economics + Security
Warcraft has been forever transformed by a networked world. Recently the US DOD admitted a huge strategic advantage that China held in “cyberwar”, the use of hacking techniques to spread disinformation, steal corporate secrets, or disrupt key resources such as electricity, water and transportation.
And it isn’t only a battle for resources and industrial espionage – it’s a battle for hearts and minds. China aggressively challenges any claim against it, from Tibet to global warming, with an army of uber-patriotic youth, who post YouTube videos and dispute foreigners online. The US army successfully uses a sophisticate, free online game – “americas army” – as a recruitment tool.
Donation Target and Ask
- Dollar amounts and campaigns TBD
- Online fundraising via Drumbeat
- a loose goal of 20% of the project raised online
Toolset and Platform
- Project mgmnt, publicity, community recruitment and fundraising using Drumbeat
- Participation, production and distribution on OpenSourceCinema.org
Timeline and Milestones
- Tied in part to Drumbeat rollout
- First call for participation and trailer Q1 2010?
- Fundraising push follows this
- First 'episode' Q2 2010? ROFLCon?
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.
- This means having both film and open web tech people on the lead creative them. At least one smart open web hacker has to be a core part of this team.