home  pluginblog The Mass, Mass Media
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Written by tom
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Just after Christmas, on the 28th December, Steal This Film Part II was released. Seemingly named after the 60's counterculture classic 'Steal This Book ' by Abbie Hoffman, 'Steal This Film ' is an attack on the current system of which defends intellectual property rights. What is also interesting is that it is an open-source media project produced in collaboration with the audience, viewers of Part 1 were asked to help out both with costs and ideas;
"Hopefully you'll enjoy the first part of steal this film...It achieves some, but by no means all of our goals. To continue we need your help. This film is free for you to share, watch on your DVD player or on your iPod or show in cinemas. But if you like the work we have done and want us to carry on, use our donate link to send us a couple of dollars or euros. We will start making the second part straight away, and release it on this site and on major bittorrent trackers when it's done....the plan for the second part is on our wiki. Feel free to add suggestions."
But this is not the only collaborative film project. January 2008 saw the opening of phase 3 of 'A Swarm of Angles '; an open-source film project to make a major film and described variously as; "...People who could change the world" to "[the] Wave of the future". In the words of the project itself;
"Whether you call it Cinema 2.0, or Open source cinema, it’s an innovative participatory experience you can be part of. Our vision is to bring filmmaker and fan together into entertainment communities making distinctive films based on artistic choices not marketing ones. This is not about making a couple of bucks, but about making cinematic history. 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+) feature film. We are gathering 50,000 people in a giant new media experiment to be part of an exclusive community which funds and helps make this film. We want people to freely download, share and remix the feature film and all original media made for this project and have embraced the flexible digital-age copyright of Creative Commons toward this end."
The project creators cite Radiohead's success with 'In Rainbows', the digital-rights management free album released directly to fans that reportedly netted the band money than all the other albums they have made put together.
It's an exciting start to 2008 and could be the way that many films get funded in the future. Micro-payments are finding more and more of a footing as systems improve and are easier to administer; think of 'Star Wars' made, written and funded by the fans!
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