Mass participation collaboration

There’s an interesting change in the air as to the state of play between user created content and professionally produced content for online audiences.

On one hand there’s the recently launched Nokia Productions spearheaded by none other than director, Spike Lee. Lee calls the project the ‘democratisation of film’. This may be true. The way in which the film comes together is through the submission of user-generated material – text, images, video and music – shot on mobile phone to the project website. All submissions, either original or mashed from others’ work, are moderated and narrowed down to the Top 10 as voted on by the community. Lee will then select the final three videos – one for each act – and cut together into the final film. This initiative will be a fascinating observation and will provide valuable learnings for the Great British Film. At the outset, it appears that the Great British Film takes a few more ambitious steps of enabling one of the content contributors a production role, the opportunity of being mentored by an industry professional and working on a real production set.

Collaboration is nothing new; it is the basis upon which the process of filmmaking lives and breathes. It seems more and more want a piece of the mass participation film collaboration – online. Last year MySpace held their Movie Mashup competition, which has resulted in ‘Faintheart’, also backed by Film4. Voting has just recently closed on the MySpace community choosing tunes for the movie’s soundtrack. And long before this there was the creative commons project, A Swarm of Angels. What is interesting to note however is on the back of the YouTube generation, the filmmaking process is opening up and becoming more inclusive of creativity in whatever form it takes.

Lee has written in his blog that he firmly believes filmmaking an artform which anyone can embrace and that film school is not necessarily for everyone pursuing a professional career. Certainly filmmaking has been a hard nut to crack for a lot of hopefuls and funding is scarce.

Simon McPhillips, UK producer of recent feature Jack Says agrees that mass participation has ‘allowed the gradual dismantling of the elitist system that Hollywood has built its foundations on’.

However social networking giant, Bebo, are moving the other way. At last month’s MIPTV conference in Cannes, Bebo President, Joanna Shields reported in a keynote address, Bebo’s move away from user-generated content. Research has shown a more sophisticated Bebo audience and changing consumer tastes. Hence the rise in media companies such as Endemol co-developing webisode series with Bebo and reaping the huge financial rewards. Shields furthered encouraged media companies to harness this shift and jump on board; ‘this is your time’, Shields promised. A very lucrative proposition when a brand can attain ready access to over 40 million Bebo members.

So what is exactly happening out there on the webosphere? If it was at all possible to poll how many online collaborative filmmakers there are out there compared to Bebo’s growing family. And what are their preferences – passive or collaborative? Now is an incredible time for content creation and distribution. The next 12 months, probably less, will show yet another shift.

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