Creative Commons Filmmaking Remixes Modern Cinema

mjeppsen writes, "Filmmaking experiment A Swarm Of Angels aims to create and distribute the first collaborative film released under a Creative Commons license. The project is using community participation and funding to make a film that would traditionally cost $3–4 million for a mere $1.75 million. The entire filmmaking process will be collaborative, from Wiki-based script creation to community voting on creative and marketing decisions. Is this just a scheme by the filmmakers to get funding for a pet project, or is it Hollywood's worst nightmare? More importantly, can 'open-source films' develop into a sustainable financial model?"

DVD and merchandising sales

With half of the 50.000 expected contributers buying a DVD, a shirt or something like that they'll make already quite a lot of money. Sounds doable!

Hey, Kids! Let's Put on a Wiki!!

With half of the 50.000 expected contributers buying a DVD, a shirt or something like that they'll make already quite a lot of money. Sounds doable!

We call that the "Community Theatre" model. You figure that every kid in the cast has at minimum five friends/family members who will be buying tickets. (The old mantra "Everybody gets a part" really means "We want to make as much money as possible.")

Which is to say, yah, it's a valid business model, but is it valid entertainment?

Since I'm about as anxious to see a wiki-communal-collaborative-online-cluster-film as I am to see the Podunk Town Players put on "Oklahoma!," my guess would be no.

Question: what's the purpose?

"Community Theatre Model" - well pointed out.

I think you slightly miss the point about community theatre, I don't think it's just a money making dodge. I think there's consciousness that it's more than just the entertainment and that the show offered might be less polished than a professional performance but there are other side benefits. People in the village/community and the participants know there is a reason for not just hiring a professional group - they are getting something out of it, whether its fun, having their 5 minutes of fame, job training, peacemaking between sub-communities that are in conflict, therapy etc. I think people generally appreciate their six months of one night a week rehearsals isn't going to make them as good an opera singer as Maria Callas. Sometimes people involve everybody to make more money but I'd day usually any money made gets ploughed back into the community or pays central crew a little bit for their time. I don't see many 'community theatre workers" in Forbes rich list.

So I think you make a good parallel - is there a similar process at work here -do the participants get to learn film making, get their 5 minutes of fame? But this doesn't necessarily mean it will be as good entertainment for non-involved viewers. Let's see. Wildcards happen.

Re:Hey, Kids! Let's Put on a Wiki!!

Sorry but when shooting a film the brunt of it and the biggest expense is the shooting, and you cant do that all over the planet, nothing like having the protagonist character being played by 30 different people all dressed the same way.

Depends on the character. Chewbacca could very well be played by 20 different people without it having much of an impact (aka "the Chewbacca rebuttal") :)

Or maybe it all happens at the bottom of a well and all they have is one match...

Yeah, community theater's such a scam

I'm sick of those rich community theater fatcats running the whole town...

'The old mantra "Everybody gets a part" really means "We want to make as much money as possible."'

I've worked in community theater. The mantra is more like 'we want to have a snowball's chance in hell of not going bankrupt on this production

You'd be surprised

You'd be surprised how many of these "Hey Kid's Let Put on a Show" productions are commerically viable.

In my area, ALL of the "ethnic" (Indian, Filipino, Balinese, etc) music and dance productions are run this way, and the production values are top notch. This isn't the Podunk Town Players - for example, Austin Texas has (or used to have) a world-class Gagaku (Japanese) ensemble.

Maybe THIS is an example of "The Long Tail" (for which I got a mod point once for arguing that it applied to the Real World as much as the Internet). No, the local high school isn't going to produce "Lethal Weapon VI" or a Madonna album, but who needs that junk? There is more joy in producing than consuming.

One

Wiki-based script creation

I don't doubt that you could get an OK or even good script by committee, but I think to get a great movie, you need one mind unhindered by others. (But you also get A LOT more junk that way)

-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]

Re:One

1. Some kind of hybrid approach might be interesting; start with the actors and a character profile for each, then throw the plot events at them sequentially, and record what they say.
2. Editing follows, tweaking the dialogue to be more "in character". You could just record a good RPG session, and then make a script.
3. Can I get a business model patent on this?

Pretty sure Mike Leigh would have prior art on you, as this is the way he's been working for 20 years.

The "problem" is all of these approaches have unintended consequences. In Mike Leigh's case, some consider his films beautiful pieces of humanistic character studies, while others have noted that the characters resulting from this method of writing and directing all seem to be comprised of a series of tourettes-like tics rather than real character traits. Even though he works with some of the best actors in the world, it's apparently difficult for them to resist trying to define their characters through idiosyncracies. It makes them harder to relate to.

Still, though, Mike Leigh's way of working still relies on singular artistic vision - his for the film as a whole, his actors' for the characters and dialogue. The truly collaborative approach being talked about here is nothing new - in fact it's the standard Hollywood method, and it's why we end up having so many generic action movies in the summer. Not every Hollywood film is the same, but the big-budget ones all end up with about 50 people getting their hands on the script before it's done, and while they may have one director, he answers to about 10 different people himself, all of whom have the power to make creative decisions. I don't know the last time the article submitter here checked the credits list on a Hollywood film, but they are all "collaborative" projects and they all involve an endless series of compromises between all the parties involved.

So I wouldn't say this is Hollywood's "worst nightmare". I'm sure Hollywood couldn't care less, but if they did, they'd probably be saying "welcome to our world". That budget is going to balloon, there's going to be endless bickering, and in the end I doubt this film is going to get made. If it does, it will be as generic as any Hollywood summer schlock. Because this isn't the anti-Hollywood method, this *is* the Hollywood method.

Look at it this way. Out of any 100 people, 5 may be truly creative. 1 out of those 5 may be both creative and have leadership qualities. The film made by that one person would be amazing; the film made by the other 4 out of the 5 creatives would be uneven but still interesting, the films made by the remaining 95 would be dreck. That's an ideal world. When you put all 100 people together to work on one film as true equals, the 95 uncreative people are going to drown out the 5 creatives, and you're going to end up with crap. Or nothing. But there's no possibility of getting any quality out of this. It's always better to rely on a singular vision in art, even if you have to hunt for the true gems.

let me predict the result

The entire filmmaking process will be collaborative, from Wiki-based script creation to community voting on creative and marketing decisions.

Filmmaking by committee. I smell success already.

ATTN: Slashdot trolls

Your time is now.

Get on over to that script wiki, treat us to some nice hot grits and make cinema history with goatse.

Been hacked?

came under both a scripted hacking attack which meant the forum had to be restored from scratch

Looks like they could do with help from some open source sysadmins.

CCL for Nerdporn?

With 1.75 million dollars, you could create some good nerd pornography. Imagine some big mainframe (1.000.000 dollars), a decent hosting environment (500.000 dollars), some specialists setting it up (200.000 dollars), fast food for weeks (40.000 dollars) and some street hookers serving the eyegalls wearing identification models in front of terminals (I'd write "priceless", if it weren't for all the asking I'd get about locations).

Writing a script for that shouldn't be all to hard, recursively searching through Slashdot and adding some random porn vocabulary to it could in fact be sufficient. I smell geekbuster.

Filmmaking by committee

Probably not. Some things are better done by consensus - running a country comes to mind. Creative endeavours do not come to mind as one of them. At best, small groups of like-minded individuals working together might achieve something remarkable but anything larger will end up diluting the original thinking of the few in favour of keeping everyone happy. I feel sure that the /. community can name a few successful collaborations between two or more people but usually its one gifted individual making a quantum leap. Examples might include Einstein, Shakespeare, Darwin, even George Lucas and the Star Wars series...

Hah.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ [creativecommons.org]
What happened to freedom 0? No commercial usage. That's more restrictive than disney. These guys are *afraid* of putting their work in the public domain. What do they think will be done with it, if it's not going to be employed commercially? They've restricted their success, the film won't go anywhere beyond this internet without it. To succeed they must let their work pass from amateur to professional, which means allowing commercial use.

Not the first.

They're not the first to do such a thing, "Elephants dream" done by some dutch school is mostly open too: http://orange.blender.org/ [blender.org], and with a lot less budget. Although the people who worked on ithis were selected in advance.

You have to pay

The summary doesn't mention that you have to pay at least 25GBP to become a member.

I might be biased but...

I'd rather fund something like another Blender Foundation film project. With Elephants Dream we got massive improvements to Blender, a large amount of high quality textures that could be used in our own works, production files that could be learned from, as well an 'advertisement' demonstrating that Blender and other open source tools (GIMP, Subversion) were capable of generating production quality work. With "A Swarm of Angels" I don't see it as likely to drive improvements for any creative tools, nor does it appear that it would provide any resources useful for either learning nor as an input of content to other work.

Is there something I'm missing about "A Swarm of Angels" that would make it a 'good idea'?

LetterRip (A dedicated Blenderhead )

Wrong question

is it Hollywood's worst nightmare? More importantly, can 'open-source films' develop into a sustainable financial model?"

is it audiences' worst nightmare? Can 'open-source films' develop into anything watchable?

I guess it might, but only because individuals with a vision are allowed to mess with the material afterwards and do it again, properly. Of course by then the title will be tainted and noone will discover someone managed to make something good out of the turkey.

What's next..

Collective musical composition... Collective painting... I agree with the the posts saying that being creative by (a large) commitee is a non-starter. A better system would be to have a large number of people suggesting ideas and have a small number (one?) actually writing the script

The answer

can 'open-source films' develop into a sustainable financial model?

No.

Wait, how much is saved?

So, They're only saving half the cost of the production?? With no big-name actors and 'community participation', I would have expected them to save a lot more. Maybe the real secret is that the funds are being used to pay their salaries, and it's not truly a work of the community as they suggest.

But even if that's not true, and they're really spending so much money to rent the sets and equipment needed, what do we gain here? We've got a plot-by-committee, which is pretty much guaranteed to be even more cliche than anything the big media companies produce, a lot of no-name actors that probably are no-name because they don't act well enough to get paid for it, and STILL half the price of a 'real' movie.

I hope they at least have the sense to carve the script in stone before they start filming. If they don't, they can kiss that budget goodbye. And probably most of their help.

Oh, and the other Creative Commons video, Elephant's Dream... I hope this is a hell of a lot better than that. I think it's neat that they worked together on it and licensed it like that and all... But it stunk. The conversations were not fluid at all. The plot almost didn't exist. And the whole thing made no sense.

It's been done already

It's called "The studio system," where a bunch of people get together and form this "company," see, and call it a "studio."

The "Studio" then hires a bunch of people who do the job of something called "writers," who actually write the initial form of something called a "treatment" which is the description of what the "movie" (which is short for moving picture, or motion picture) will be.

The "Studio," actually, the people who own the "company CALLED "the Studio" then hand the "treatment" over to some OTHER people who then re-write the "treatment" into a form called a "script," which is what the actors and the guy who tells everybody what to do on the "set" (which is really everywhere the people from the "Studio" go to film the "movie") use to tell the story IN the original "treatment."

The "Studio" then takes the "script" and gives it to ANOTHER bunch of people who then re-write the "script" to make it "more marketable," meaning that it is less like the original "treatment" or the original "script."

This is done until the final "script" has NO resemblance to the original "treatment" or "script."

Sometimes, a Studio will even take something called a "book," which is a story that is found printed on a bunch of pages glued together on one side to hold them together for easy carrying and reading.

By the time the "book" has gone through the process above, it often has little similarity as a movie to the story in the book. For examples of that, see "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" from Disney Studios where the tragic ending in the book was changed to a HAPPY ending in the cartoon version and JFK starring Kevin Costner, which has only passing similarity to reality.

Lee Darrow

Becomes porn in 3..2..

Action.

It's a Trap!

1. Setup something to use this "open model" people preach,
2. Don't really care about it, you don't want it to do well,
3. It flubs/is canceled,
4. Yell about how openness is useless,
5. Pass laws,
6. Profit!


I maybe too cynical, but it's not like it's that far out-there. The RIAA has done worse.

Ah yes, the wisdom and talent of the crowds

Because we all know that artistic and technical talent are democratically distributed throughout the teeming masses! This is taking democracy way too far. Didn't anyone learn from Snakes on a Plane? You need to find good, talented writers, not give every schmuck his or her chance to take a crack at it. How about using the wiki as a way to submit your work for review to see if you can make it as a contributor instead?

But... but... that would destroy the democratic idealism!

New comedy idea...

I'll just make the 'Making Of...' documentary of this...

Is "Open Source" the new .com?

Ok, the idea open source software I understand. The name and idea are derived from having open source code.
What is an open source movie?
Whats next, open source pet supplies?

Committee film making

Ask Terry Gillham(sp?) whatever happened to his Man from La Manchia film. Better yet, watch the documentary "Lost in La Manchia'. And, that was with professionals.

$1 million is a lot for making an indie movie...

For example, Napoleon Dynamite was made for around $500K, as was Brick. This isn't unsual at all. In fact, $1 million is the comfortable minimum for producing a low-budget movie shot on film.

As for this "film production by committee" approach, I already since a disaster, especially with how they plan to develop a script.

A better idea would be to hold a screenwriting contest. People submit their screenplays for consideration. A judging panel selects 10 finalists, which are chosen based on quality and ability to be produced for less than $1.75 million. The members of this production (those who have put in their money to contribute) vote for the one out of the ten they want to see produced. The runner up becomes a fallback, should problems arise in the preproduction of the winning screenplay.

"I don't know the key to success ...

... but the key to failure is trying to please everybody."
-- Bill Cosby

Art by commitee rarely works. Yeah, you can finish the project, even make some money, but it probably won't be art anymore. Hollywood scared? Hardly. They invented the process.

Color me not impressed

Robert Rodriguez did his award-winning film "El Mariachi" for U$S 16.000 [amazon.com]. He did it by using a minimum crew that worked for free, using stuff he already had at hand, using cheap lighting, university facilities, and some other technical money-saving techniques. Most of the money went to buying and developing film... so it could be argued that if he had access to a digital video camera at the time the movie would have cost almost nothing.

Kevin Smith did the award-winning cult-classic movie "Clerks" for U$S 27.000.

Hollywood doesn't know how to make movies for less than a couple of millions, and probably doesn't care... because throwing those millions around probably simplifies the process of getting the movie done on time, and they collect a bundle anyway, so it makes no sense to them to spend too little.

So actually... making a movie that would ordinarily cost 3-5 M for 1.75 M doesn't impress me.

collaborative novel are cr*p

Ever read one of those novels written by a large number people?
They tend to be poor and uneven. A creative effort needs a strong leader. I'm guessing the same will be true for a collaborative movie.

Freeborn

Freeborn has been created somewhat with this model. Their forums and the werewolf fan community have contributed quite a bit to what they want to see in the movie so in a sense they are open with certain aspects of it.

Star Wreck

Star Wreck was something (tho not exactly) like this.

It was worth the time I spent to watch it and I got some intentional laughs from it.

The key is the writing. It was decent but a little sophmoric in SW. Some parts were brilliant- truly brilliant- fresh new concepts- well delivered. A few parts were stale and cliched and probably should have been rewritten a few more times.

Then you need good actors to deliver the writing. While no one was a pro in SW, they were never wooden. Too camp for my taste but I recognize that was intentional.

A problem shared by the biggest budget, slickest hollywood production and the smallest fan film is when the person with power falls in love with some stupid idea. In the hollywood thing, they have the money so they destroy the film because they want something stupid in. In the independent thing, they are the creative force so they create the film that they want to create- it's true to their vision- but it stinks because some part of that vision was irritating to 99.9% of the rest of the world.

Big picture: We have a HUGE GLUT of entertainment in the world all ready. There are many wonderful 1930's films that are still rib crackingly funny (Bringing up Baby, A night at the Opera) or heartbreaking etc. Decades of great music. Decades of films. Decades of television shows. Every day the target audience fragments more. At some point- the salaries and the prices of entertainment must drop. Already, there's no point in pirating most movies since if you wait a few months you can pick them up for $5 to $8 bucks.

Copyright is not needed to encourage entertainment creation. If you create anything even remotely popular, at a $1 a pop, you are set for a couple years. That's huge incentive.

All I keep picturing...

...is Mel Gibson and Homer Simpson's remix of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Sounds even better that Scott of the Antarctic

Oops, I mean Scott of the Sahara.

IndieTalk.com

This is similar to an existing project we've been working on over at indietalk.com [indietalk.com]. We've been talking about this for a few months now.

Budget? So far, $0.

There's at least 10 people involved from at least three countries (USA, Canada, UK, maybe more).

skeptical

the main failure here is that they'll get all of this (potentially) amazing user input, and in the end they'll only create ONE movie.

that's a fairly Hollywood idea - get a lot of talented and experienced people into a room to make a movie, then invite a bunch of people from the streets to a Recruited Audience Screening, get their unbiased and unprofessional opinion, and then remake the movie to address all of the recruited audience comments.

If they really want to be experimental and daring and non-Hollywood, they should let everyone be able to make their own movie. Jury's still out on how that could be mounted.

LJOVA violist, film composer, arranger [ljova.com]

Wiki-based script creation

I can see it now...

SCENE I

[Enter Main Character]
Main Character: Have you heard you heard that the population of African Elephants has tripled over the last few months?

THE END

A mere $1.75 million

There are plenty of talented independent filmmakers who are capable of making a film for far less than that. I'd think that one of the primary benefits of trying this hybrid open source model for filmmaking would be that costs would be kept down substantially. Seriously, why not set a goal of making a film using this collaboration methodology for sub $100,000? Good films can be made at that price point, especially if you don't have to pay talent to act and don't need to rent a lot of gear. Are they planning on trying to get A-List talent to act in this frankenfilm? Such a bloated budget leads me to believe that it's either not well thought-out or somebody is trying to derive a substantial income from the process. If you're going to test the unknown when it comes to development methodology, why not do it on the cheap? That budget may be pie in the sky, but it's way too high.

I also agree with all the other posters who said that the process is most likely to lead to a stillborn film that will likely be unwatchable. I'm a sysadmin turned film producer, and based on my experience the best films are a labor of love by one or a handful of strong-willed individuals. I've been to Sundance and countless other festivals, and from what I've seen the best independent films are always driven by the vision of a single individual (or at most a small few). You want to see the collaborative process at work, just watch any sitcom on television today. Those are all written in a collaborative type methodology. What happens is individual politics and lobbying get in the way of a good product ... i.e. "You vote for my joke, and I'll vote for yours". It rarely works. You need a Larry David to act as a totalitarian leader much like linux needs Linus.

I highly recommend the film 'The Kid Stays in the Picture' for a behind the scenes look at the Hollywood creative process. Book is even better. Fact is that Robert Evans was dogmatic and totalitarian about how his pictures were produced, and he wouldn't settle for second-rate choices. And the films he produced were far far greater works of art because of it. He went head-to-head with Coppola on 'The Godfather' and won ... "The fat fuck shot a great film, but it ain't on the screen. It's either in his kitchen or on the cutting room floor."

Yes

Filmmaking inherently borrows many aspects of open source. For example, there are generic plots, generic characters, and re-use of music. How many different times has "The Seven Samurai" been reworked into a different movie? How often is a song used as a cliche to describe a character, time, or experience? How often is the same charachter type re-used as a means of avoiding exposition?

Re:creativity

I think you prove my point. Some people consider Mulholland Drive a brilliant film, others hate it. It would be impossible to make such a film by committee.