More About Open-Source Storytelling, YouTube ("Part 3")

While finishing Part 1 and Part 2 of Online Video: Getting Paid, Open-Source Storytelling I realised that I did not mention a couple of things worth mentioning and also just found a couple of interesting links:


Some More Open-Source/Collaborative Movies

• Panorama Ephemera by Rick Prelinger (2004, 89:35 min., color and black and white) "is a collage of sequences drawn from a wide variety of ephemeral (industrial, advertising, educational and amateur) films, touring the conflicted landscapes of twentieth-century America. The films' often-skewed visions construct an American history filled with horror and hope, unreeling in familiar and unexpected ways".

This is of course Rick Prelinger from the Prelinger Archives at the Internet Archive.

The blog entry Kicking Out The Pixel Jams (www.skynoise.net) lists a couple of open-source movies that I did not mention:

• Nothing So Strange by Brian Flemming is a "feature-length documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates, which debuted at Slamdance in January 2002".

Source footage is here.

• now!, it looks like the project is finished, not all features on the website seem to work.

Read the above linked blog entry for a few other related projects...

Then there is of course the Open Source Movies section at the Internet Archive where you can upload your own work. This is the only free hosting site for independent movies that I can really recommend. You need to upload via ftp, but the Archive's TOS is better than any other one out there (except for Ourmedia which unfortunately is still experiencing technical problems).

Some of the movies mentioned earlier can also be downloaded via Legaltorrents.com.


And two more projects made with some kind of input from a larger crowd:

(Blog entry:) His Fans Greenlight the Project (www.bravenewfilms.org) "(Jim) Gilliam founded Brave New Films in 2004 along with Robert Greenwald, the documentary producer-director behind projects including "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" and his most recent, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.""

Their concept: "Why not get the audience to pay for a movie before it gets made - He calls it "People Powered Film.""

This of course is a bit like the idea that A Swarm of Angels also has.

Snakes On A Plane (en.wikipedia.org): "In response to the internet fan base, New Line Cinema incorporated feedback from online users into its production." The movie was hyped a lot online, but when it was released in the Summer of 2006 it was not quite as successful as some had hoped...


Finding Out What YouTube Is

After posting my thoughts about YouTube I found the blog entry Youtube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (www.henryjenkins.org) that somehow has similar views on what YouTube might be: "Vaudeville was an actor-centered mode of production. There was no director who could build an ensemble piece. Actors chose their own material, refined their own skills, and lived and died entirely on the basis of their ability to connect one on one with the audience. (...) Similarly, YouTube is a space of individualized expression."

When you compare this to what I wrote (in Part 2) "we could look at YouTube as a dynamic, interactive movie where everyone can view his own version and/or contribute to the "source footage". And to me this seems not to be so much a democratic process, but more an anarchist-creative collaboration" I think you can see some similarities between those two views.

Finally some more related links for research:

Personalize Media
Cross-Media Entertainment
WRT: Writer Response Theory
Storytron - Interactive Storytelling

I also forgot to mention earlier that if you previously linked to or bookmarked the Audiovisual P2P Wiki page that you might need to update your bookmarks, the URL is slightly different since the P2P Foundation moved to a new host.

tags: opensource, p2p, filmmaking, collaboration, storytelling, youtube