chickenmash

 Dan from Stray Cinema talked to our class today at Vic. Stray Cinema is based around a website (straycinema.com) which allows people to access film footage shot specifically for the project. The footage is freely available under the creative commons license to be used for Stray Cinema projects (or in outside projects with credit to the original producers).

One of Dan’s points was that the ideology behind open source thinking could be applied to a wider field than just software development. This is an idea I am keen support as I (like many) see open source as one of the best political/ideological developments of our generation. 

One of the key ideas of open source is that by opening up access to your material you create communities of interest, people are drawn to a project by their own will to participate and create something of quality. The openness leads to greater overall development potential than closed circles working in competition with each other. The emphasis is on quality rather than commercial imperatives or limitations.

This has proven itself well in the area of software development where peoples ideas and time are the main necessary resources. Other production requirements are fairly basic (unless I’m mistaken it doesn’t take especially high powered or exclusive hardware to write and compile software). How then can this be translated into film where the production requirements and economics are potentially far more complex and demanding?

In terms of film as a narrative medium it seems problematic. At the high end of production so many factors come together, collaboration, communication & co-operation between heads of departments and crews is challenging enough. The economics of a shoot don’t leave much time for community based decision making.

Of course, open source cinema is not proposing itself as a replacement for auteur style cinema, or studio driven narrative films, it is suggesting itself as another alternative with potentially different forms altogether.

Accordingly most of the examples I saw on the Stray Cinema website were non narrative mash ups or very loose experimental narratives.

What I would like to discuss here though is how the principles of open source could be applied to narrative cinema with a potentially mainstream appeal.

I think for now I would consider the production phase itself as off limits. Be interested to hear differing opinions on that point.

The script and concept development phase seems wide open. It is still hard to imagine this working with the current culture of idea ownership and associated financial reward system. But practically at least open source style script collaboration is imaginable. 

Take one concept for a movie. Set it up like a wiki. People who are excited by the idea/genre can contribute plot and character possibilities. These can be debated and the idea would potentially break into distinct factions which could become entirely separate movies. Characters and themes could be defined and expanded in separate areas of the wiki. The merits of different peoples writing for scenes could be rated against the idea of the character and their potential for action.

You could possibly have pools of characters that could be developed distinctly and drawn from for further script ideas.

People could hone and develop other people’s scenes and dialogue with only minimal wiki style moderation.

Would these writers be able to be financially rewarded for creating such a movie? Maybe not, but there would be reward in seeing the results on screen which might just be enough for many dedicated cinephiles. Edits and authorship can be quite accurately tracked within a wiki so there could potentially be some form of distributed reimbursement.

Like for open source programmers open source screenwriting could become an access point for contract based writing and project development.

There would be some issues in terms of studio or production company rights to produce these movies. Maybe if anyone was potentially able to produce a script without having to bid for the rights it might naturally fall to the company who seemed likely to produce the best and most successful result (although it could also just as easily turn into an ugly race for potential first release, and lets not even talk about the studio side fear of instability and unpredictably). 

Editing is another process which could function well collectively. Offline quality raw material could be made available for download, EDL’s or project files are then relatively small and easily traded via online communities.

An edit of a film could quickly evolve with many scenes being cut by different editors simultaneously. Fine cutting and tuning could also proceed as people built on each other’s work. There would again be the potential for completely separate branches of the film to develop, with people either grouping around popular story and performance choices or splitting off in their own directions. It would be interesting to see multiple versions of films released (even just on the web) and the sorts of debates that would inevitably follow.

Would it destroy interest in the release of a film if all raw material could be watched in advance? Or would the interest in the possibilities for the final project just grow?

Of course post production is not without it’s own financial constraints. Post-production finishing of shots can be more expensive than actually shooting, especially if much of the shot is computer generated.

In the near future this sort of process might be best applied to films that are not heavy on complex digital effects. There is plenty of scope in this but it is a shame considering the sorts of existing online film making communities that surround films like Star Wars for example, which are also intensively computer generated.

People have already taken it on themselves to re-edit those movies as they were released and there are multitudes of effects libraries and tutorials based around recreating some of the trademark visual effects using consumer equipment.

There seems little reason why the raw material of these films couldn’t be released to fans following their official cinema release. Whatever would be done from that point could only serve to grow the culture and fan base. 

These are just a couple of ideas, I am sure there is far more potential. And imagine if the conception and finishing of movies was driven by people’s collective desire to witness something amazing, rather than a studios idea of a concept that would sell well and have mass audience appeal. 

Audience participation and reaction to filmic product would be quite different if the focus groups were made up of fans who were dedicated enough to invest their time, be involved, and develop a sense of ownership of the product, rather than say an end of the line critique by the people in shopping malls with nothing better to do.

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