Creative Commons Filmmaking Remixes Modern Cinema 114
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey, Kids! Let's Put on a Wiki!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Who gives a flying fuck about a business model? I mean, really... if every participant involved enjoys what they're doing, they collectively get the equipment without sacrifices they aren't prepared to make, and they produce entertainment or art that people can enjoy, who cares if there's a business model? Not everything has to be a business.
You know... what should be expected is that good non-commercial art WON'T be appreciated by everyone. Only pulpy Hollywood crap t
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you CANT do this on a film that will have any semblance of continuity. your core cast must be in the movie from beginning to end and even switching DP's will screw up a films feel. you need the same guy running the camer the same guy doing lighting, etc... o
Re:Hey, Kids! Let's Put on a Wiki!! (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe it all happens at the bottom of a well and all they have is one match...
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Wanna bet? Personally, I can recall a certain zero budget film that even had shots in space.
Or, wait, did they use CGI and bluescreen?
Technology has advanced to the point where most films could plausibly be made in a livingroom. You could get away with scenes with actors who'd never even been in the same room, or even in the same country. Maybe not fistfights or lovescenes yet, but within a few years you'll probably even be able to paste on the appearance of a sp
It's AUTEUR driven not wiki-driven (Score:2, Informative)
So it is not a free for all of community ideas, but a member cluster that help influence and feedback on the directors vision. It plainly says he is writing the 2 initial scripts, but then members can present edits on a wiki and propose ideas/discussion on the forum.
Yeah, community theater's such a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
'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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
mod parent up (Score:2)
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_8/moglen/ind
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One (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
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I think you can produce a workable script through committee writing, but there are going to be serious tradeoffs when you produce a script this way; most really stupid ideas will be noticed early on and eliminated (the immaculate conception of Darth Vader), but at the same time the more people you add the more generic th
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http://noosphere.princeton.edu/ [princeton.edu]
?
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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?
4.
5. Profit!!!
Re:One (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wikipedia the movie - coming soon (Score:3, Funny)
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Heroine: "I've arrived at last"
Hero: "I can't help feeling things are just starting to get hot"
Hero: "Do you want grits with them?"
Heroine: "yeah right, only in Soviet Russia would you say that"
Hero: "but in Russia, all your bases belong to us now"
yeah, maybe we shoud stick to the tried and tried and tried Hollywood formula plots.
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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)
I wish them luck, but this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me for a variety of reasons.
1) Most of the public will never hear about this. This means that those who do know about it and participate are unlikely to have what for lack of a better term I will call "common tastes". I can just
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Not really a problem as the script doesn't appear to be that open to involvement from the swarm. I joined the project when it made it onto Digg a couple or three weeks ago (and this isn't a dig(!) at Slashdot because I question whether it should be getting a mention anywhere.) and looked through the forums. I was member 780-ish of the proposed 1000 before membership is closed for phase 1. I went on the forums that constitute the bulk
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-Eric
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let me predict the result (Score:5, Insightful)
Filmmaking by committee. I smell success already.
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No.
But neither do you have to be an academic to understand what is distinctive about a John Ford western or a Hitchcock thriller.
ATTN: Slashdot trolls (Score:4, Funny)
Get on over to that script wiki, treat us to some nice hot grits and make cinema history with goatse.
The Ultimate Horror movie (Score:1)
Been hacked? (Score:2)
Looks like they could do with help from some open source sysadmins.
CCL for Nerdporn? (Score:2, Funny)
Writing a script for that shouldn't be all to hard, recursively searching th
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Nerd Meme (Score:2)
Sharks with lasers (action sequence)
Natalie Portman (hottie)
Hot Grits (food)
Petrification (horror)
a deja vu scene (dupes)
an Apple/PC commercial (flamewar)
beowulf reference (classic poetry)
basements
Okay, you can leave out goat.cx, thank you very much.
Filmmaking by committee (Score:1)
Bad examples tend to show the opposite (Score:2)
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Hah. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (Score:2)
Universal, Warner Bros, paramount, MGM being more permissive than the worser of the creative commons licenses would allow.
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Weather it is really a good idea to do this or not, well, that is another story....
Not the first. (Score:3, Informative)
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Overall I think it was a good thing, hopefully good for the university that did it and that they'll do it again. After all, it had great attention in the OSS-world, largest swarm I've ever seen on a torrent.
You have to pay (Score:5, Informative)
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As I understand you'll pay 25 GBP (that's 37.29 Euros, 46.93 US$ or 2360.40 Afghanistan Afghanis) to be part of a swarm of people producing a movie that everyone will eventually more or less agree on?!
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Or they will have a screen at the end in which each participant is represented by a pixel; and best of all everyone will get to chose which color they want to be, all for just 25.. - they should have gone for 24.99 GBP...
Sorry for being cynical, but I had high hopes after reading the title. A Creative Commons movie is a
I might be biased but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there something I'm missing about "A Swarm of Angels" that would make it a 'good idea'?
LetterRip (A dedicated Blenderhead )
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I have to support a project that allows some random kid to start into 3d without havign to become a criminal or mortgage the family home. and that alone makes blender far better than maya and
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Wrong question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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The script part is only a small fraction of the job, you should keep it consistent (and make sure that it is something the actors and director are actually wanting to shot), then look for volunteers to create what you need from sketches or detailed description. That way, you can use your talent+idea+leadership+hard work and the talent+pride of the geeks to make a good
The answer (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Wait, how much is saved? (Score:2)
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 c
It's been done already (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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I'm going to call shenanigans on this one. Putting glue on one side of each page seems like it'd make reading this "book" thing even more difficult. Or perhaps it's a low-tack adhesive, like you find on sticky notes? I suppose that could work. And it sounds just like something the "studios" would come up with. After all, you wouldn't
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All of which makes you wonder how the good films get made. Usually, it's because someone with a really insistent vision, a buttload of money, and enough backing from the studio that they don't get messed with, is at the reins. This seems to be the exact opposite of the studio system so eloquently described by Lee, and of the collective method espoused by those wacky collectivists.
Open Source offers great advantages. That doesn't mean it can be shoehorned into every situation.
Becomes porn in 3..2.. (Score:3, Funny)
It's a Trap! (Score:2)
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.
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5. Pass laws,
in this context of open film making. Can you elaborate?
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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New comedy idea... (Score:2)
Is "Open Source" the new .com? (Score:1)
What is an open source movie?
Whats next, open source pet supplies?
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Committee film making (Score:2)
$1 million is a lot for making an indie movie... (Score:2)
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
Re:$1 million is a lot for making an indie movie.. (Score:1)
"I don't know the key to success ... (Score:2, Insightful)
-- Bill Cosby
Art by commitee rarely works. Yeah, you can finish the project, even make some money, but it probably won't be art anymore. Hollywood scared? Hardly. They invented the process.
This is NOT like Open Source Code (Score:2)
I think this would make the program better, you think that would make it better. We can talk about it in forums, others can argue and debate about it. Then we can both sit down and code. You can add my patch, and see what you end up with. People can add your patch and see what they end up with. We can fork the project, people can apply patches, our pataches can be accepted or rejected. No mater what happens, be it by merit or politics, everyone can ha
Color me not impressed (Score:2)
Kevin Smith did the award-winning cult-classic movie "Clerks" for U$S
Re:Color parent not informed (Score:1)
You forgot the part about where Robert Rodriguez got the investment capital. He got the money taking weird drugs as a guinea pig for a Mexican pharmaceutical company. Not recommended for the average Pedro. As for Clerks costing $27,000: that was just to pay for the sound track at $1000 a song, the going rate. Everyone worked for free on that job, but you can
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You've obviously never made a movie before. Hollywood doesn't throw money around willy-nilly. Every penny is budgeted and accounted for. Everyone knows their job and does it right the first time -- and they are well rewarded for it because Hollywood appreciates a good worker and has no time for fuck-ups. Bringing a movie in on time saves money, it doesn't waste it. Every day that a movie goes over budget costs a small fortune. Real movies (not garbage shot in mom's basement) cost real money. I sugge
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Both films were completed with money far in excess of these "original" and oft-quoted budgets. This completion money was critical to producing an actual viewable, marketable film from each project. Clerks's budget was more in the hundred-thousand range and El Mariachi's I think ended similarly. I don't know what that is in 2006 dollars but I'll grant it's still a lot less than 1.7M, assuming the 1.7M refers only to production costs.
collaborative novel are cr*p (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
Star Wreck (Score:2)
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
All I keep picturing... (Score:1)
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Mel: A dog? But then no one will know what's going on!
Homer: They will if you give him shifty eyes. Then they'll suspect the dog!
Sounds even better that Scott of the Antarctic (Score:2)
IndieTalk.com (Score:1)
Budget? So far, $0.
There's at least 10 people involved from at least three countries (USA, Canada, UK, maybe more).
skeptical (Score:1)
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-Holly
Wiki-based script creation (Score:1)
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 (Score:1)
Yes (Score:2)
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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.
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