Participatory Filmmaking, A Swarm of Angels and 50,000 Beds

Article PhotoThis weekend I spoke at The Creators Series in New York, an event organized by the new curatorial and media group, Tomorrow Unlimited. The program brought together fifteen individuals from various creative disciplines to talk about what’s emerging in their fields, and collectively speculate on where things are headed. Of the six categories of creatives, I found the “Participatory Filmmaking” grouping to be particularly interesting from a Worldchanging perspective. Matt Hanson, Chris Doyle and Martin Percy formed a complementary trio of innovators using film to change cultural conversations and challenge existing frameworks for making and experiencing film. Matt Hanson presented his work-in-progress, A Swarm of Angels, an “open source cinema” project that proposes creating a £1 million feature film with distributed models for financing, screenplay development and distribution. The project invites contributions from a limited group of collaborators, with the amount of creative input correlated with the amount donated. Over a series of phases, Swarm will bring together 50,000 individuals to complete their goal. A Swarm of Angels is a third way between the top-down approach of traditional filmmaking and the bottom-up nature of user-generated content. A way for anyone to influence the creation of a professional £1 million+ ($1.8M… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Communications and Networking at 12:54 PM)