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=== Title ===
=== The WebMadeMovie ===


'''A Movie About The Web, By The Web''' <br>
'''A Movie About The Web, By The Web''' <br>
What will the web look like in 50 years? Will it continue on a tradition of openness and transparency, or will corporate interests transform the network into a closed platform built to serve a powerful few?  By gathering a broad spectrum of stories from the "fringe" of the network, global stories that are emerging right now from people pushing the Web in new directions, the Web Made Movie will document how the networked world is changing our lives.


A collaborative documentary exploring the power of networks. We´re getting so used to the internet that we no longer stop to think about it. Why we love it. Why we hate it. What it really is.
As much about what the web is now as what it will become, the project will show the ways in which people are using the power of networks to create community and transform society in unexpected ways. The Web Made Movie will focus on what the Network looks like offline - to show how it is connecting community, altering our relationship to knowledge and power, and re-wiring our brains. The WebMadeMovie will ultimately celebrate how the Internet is less a machine created by a select few brilliant minds, but is in fact shaped by everyone.


(The internet is us. We are the internet - and we all shape it.The porn, the scamsters, the magical connectedness; it's all - us.)
=== Framework  ===
The WebMadeMovie is an umbrella project for multiple initiatives that aim to produce not one but multiple films, interactive documentaries, short-form episodes and software projects. It is an initiative to encourage commons-based production and develop the tools to make that happen.


=== Background ===
The project will be bootstrapped by a team of  international documentary filmmakers who will shoot initial episodes and serve as moderators of key episodes.   Each filmmaker will bring a slant, a vision and a community to the project in addition to the original material that they will shoot and produce for their respective episode.
Brett Gaylor [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RiP!:_A_Remix_Manifesto (Rip! A Remix Manifesto]]) and Henrik Moltke ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Copy_Bad_Copy Good Copy Bad Copy]]) are developing a documentary project investigating the social effects of the World Wide Web. The goal is to show how very different people and groups are changing because of the Internet - from everyday tasks, to crime, sex and identity.


=== Description  ===
They will manage the communities that sprout up around their episodes and bring their own communities. In this way the project will have a pluralized, international spirit with wildly divergent aesthetics, processes and perspectives. Just like the web.
An overall "umbrella project" will begin on OpenSouurceCinema.org to host a series of episodes profiling communities that illustrate the community-building power of the web. These will be built collaboratively using the task-based system of Open Source Cinema - each episode will be built in a participatory manner.


The project will be bootstrapped by a team of professional, international documentary filmmakers who will shoot initial episodes and serve as moderators of their respective episodes. They will manage the communities that sprout up around their episodes and bring their own communities.  In this way the project will have a pluralized, international feel, and will have wildly divergent aesthetics, processes and perspectives. Just like the web.
In addition to the series of episodes, a "release" version will be edited together to create a feature length film, which will be toured to international film festivals and broadcast on TV networks and spread to P2P networks in a finished state. If the community building the film is large and lively enough, multiple releases may be made over time.


HTML5 video and other open web technologies will be combine to create a whole new kind of media experience -- letting viewers and community members mix video, social media and data from across the web in real time. The goal will be to keep nimble and generative: as open video practices and technology evolve, so will the project. The blue sky vision would be the creation of a living documentary, a wiki-type experience that can be changed and morphed through user contributions.
=== Platforms + Communities ===
The collaborative filmmaking website OpenSourceCinema.org will be used to solicit uploading and remixing of video, images and audio material from web users. Using the task-based system of Open Source Cinema each episode will be built in a participatory manner. The WebMadeMovie will benefit from the 5000 strong Open Source Cinema user base, a group of passionate collaborators who already succeeded in creating the award winning "Rip! A Remix Manifesto:.


Eventually a "release" version will be edited together to create a feature length film, which will be toured to international film festivals and broadcast on TV networks and spread to P2P networks in a finished state. If the community building the film is large and lively enough, multiple releases may be made over time (once a year?).
Joining this community will be thousands of Mozillians who join the project from  [[Drumbeat|Mozilla Drumbeat]] - an international effort to "enable internet users to understand, participate and take control of their online lives".  Leveraging this vast userbase, the project will have a global reach and impact, and empower Mozillians to create a participatory culture project with the same ambition and scope as Firefox.
 
=== Technology ===
OpenSourceCinema.org is currently in active beta and will leverage the WebMadeMovie to improve integration of the Kaltura web-based editing software.  Functionality currently exists to upload and edit audiovisual material, import from youtube + flicker.  Open Source Cinema also has an efficient task-based collaboration system for soliciting and tracking contributions.
 
The WebMadeMovie will also produce a robust data layer on top of video.  Working with developers to create software to take advantage of HTML5 video and other technologies, the project will allow viewers and community members to mix video, social media and data from across the web in real time. Annotating video with URLs, tagging videos, and integrating data from feeds, and things we haven't thought of yet are ways in which the data layer.  The goal will be to keep nimble and generative: as open video practices and technology evolve, so will the project. The blue sky vision would be the creation of a living documentary, a wiki-type experience that can be changed and morphed through user contributions.


=== How does this make the web better?  ===
=== How does this make the web better?  ===
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# Show the creative potential of open HTML5 video by building a high profile participatory project that blends video clips, social media and data from across the web. At both the technical and creative level, it will demonstrate the online video is more than 'tv on a computer'.
# Show the creative potential of open HTML5 video by building a high profile participatory project that blends video clips, social media and data from across the web. At both the technical and creative level, it will demonstrate the online video is more than 'tv on a computer'.
# Advance the field of 'open source cinema', pushing the envelope of collaborative online movie by drawing on experience from RIP, GCBC and Mozilla.
# Advance the field of 'open source cinema', pushing the envelope of collaborative online movie by drawing on experience from RIP, GCBC and Mozilla.
=== Tags  ===
open video remix manifesto good copy bad copy collaborative documentary
=== Video  ===
Examples of work by the two lead directors can be found here:
Rip trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oar9glUCL0
Good Copy Bad Copy Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9vaQ9Ncmps


=== Participation asks  ===
=== Participation asks  ===
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**Creating core story lines and episodes to prime the pump
**Creating core story lines and episodes to prime the pump
** Editing and refining materials into compelling media experience (release version and episodes)
** Editing and refining materials into compelling media experience (release version and episodes)
*** In a way, the filmmakers become like DJs or curators of the whole experience
*** The filmmakers become DJs or curators of the whole experience
*Contributions from "amateurs" (those who do it for the love of it)
*Contributions from "amateurs" (those who do it for the love of it)
**photos
**photos
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=== Content and Episodes ===
=== Content and Episodes ===
These are drafts of potential epsidoes - the development phase will yield more concrete, character-based investigations of communities. Also, the development process will also include an open source component -- community content will yield new ideas and episodes.
Drafting the content and focus of the project will be a community effort, and specific effort will be made to ensure episodes are diverse and global.  Stories we are searching for are character based, in the "real world", and focus on action and verité rather than strictly interviews.
 
'''1: The Power of Networks (or, Where Wizards Stay Up Late)'''
 
Little is known about the characters who built the networks that would eventually become the Internet – visiting these humble engineers will tell the story of a system based on openness and intellectual curiosity, and the tensions that naturally lead to the Internet exiting its home at the Department of Defense and enter, if not swallow mainstream culture whole.
 
This section will also explore the early tension between those who worked towards an “open” internet and the existing industrial powers that it posed to disrupt.
 
'''2: Creativity'''
 
The network has uprooted culture for geography and local tradition, allowing artists to create new fellowships, new territories and new tribes. It has decimated traditional avenues for compensation, while providing exciting new ones. It has made us question originality and plagiarism, authorship, collaboration and “professional art”.
 
We’ll follow Amanda Palmer, an independent musician who keeps attacking the major label she has as contract with and uses social networking to connect directly with fans.
 
Launched in 2007, Ravelry is a web community of fiber artists (knitters) that quickly grew to over 400,000 users. We’ll work with the Ravelry community and have them self-document, by uploading videoblogs, create timelapses of creations, and reflect on what networks has done to the knitting community.
 
We also want to explore how our notions of originality are changing, how “digital natives”, have changed their view of originality and creativity.  Are we in danger of losing the ability to create a culture of today?  Are we regurgitating? Here I will follow the AV/DJs The Eclectic Method, whose perfectly synchronized audio/visual remixes depend on instant access to the canon of humankinds cinematic and musical output.  While each of their mixes juxtaposes and creates a new meaning in the mind of the watcher/listener, is it moving too fast to digest?
 
'''3: Identity + Attention – The Digital Native'''
 
"Using the latest brain-scanning technology, scientists at the UCLA Medical School have discovered that constant immersion in digital worlds is creating new neural networks in the left front part of the brain (the dorso- lateral prefrontal cortex) that cause digital natives to 'respond faster' to digital stimulation, but it has been found that they also 'code information differently' and “have shorter attention spans” than digital immigrants. Constant and prolonged exposure to digital technology is creating new neural circuits in our brains and weakening older, more established ones. "
 
Characters in this section will emerge from brainstorming sessions at Open Source Cinema, but will also be informed by interviews with John Palfrey, author of “Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives” and Alea Vit, a digital native herself who runs the Digital Natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center.
 
'''4: Knowledge and Power'''
 
Iranian protestors used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to circumvent the government’s ban on foreign journalism. But the government used this same network to spy on, intimidate and harass activists. And almost all 21st century dictatorships (Cuba, Burma, China) have taken advantage of the networks ubiquity to spy on citizens and present a filtered view of the world. Consider China’s “Golden Shield”, some 20,000 “internet police” who eavesdrop on the network searching for dissidents. These same police add thousands and thousands of websites a day to a filter (called by some the “Great Firewall”) that prevents Chinese citizens from accessing information considered dangerous to the government.
 
In this section we will work closely with the anonymous Iranian community at iran.whyweprotest.net .This is the community responsible for publishing the shocking images that the Western news media used to report on the situation in Iran. And we will document the triangle of Chinese police eavesdropping, Google collaborating with the Chinese government, and Chinese activists trying to communicate information


'''5: Economics + Security'''
Some examples of content areas currently being researched:


Warcraft has been forever transformed by a networked world.  Recently the US DOD admitted a huge strategic advantage that China held in “cyberwar”, the use of hacking techniques to spread disinformation, steal corporate secrets, or disrupt key resources such as electricity, water and transportation.
* The Iranian twitter revolution
* China's firewall
* Brazil's Pontos de Cultura
* Homeless bloggers in Vancouver's Downtown East Side
* Studies of Digital Natives at Harvard
* Rise of the IndieRock Super Star
* MakerCulture invents the Replicator


And it isn’t only a battle for resources and industrial espionage – it’s a battle for hearts and minds. China aggressively challenges any claim against it, from Tibet to global warming, with an army of uber-patriotic youth, who post YouTube videos and dispute foreigners online. The US army successfully uses a sophisticate, free online game – “americas army” – as a recruitment tool.
=== People ===
Brett Gaylor, filmmaker, [http://www.opensourcecinema.org Rip! A Remix Manifesto]
Henrik Moltke, filmmaker, [http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net Good Copy Bad Copy]
Mark Surman, ED, Mozilla


=== Donation Target and Ask  ===
=== Donation Target and Ask  ===

Latest revision as of 15:59, 24 February 2010

The WebMadeMovie

A Movie About The Web, By The Web
What will the web look like in 50 years? Will it continue on a tradition of openness and transparency, or will corporate interests transform the network into a closed platform built to serve a powerful few? By gathering a broad spectrum of stories from the "fringe" of the network, global stories that are emerging right now from people pushing the Web in new directions, the Web Made Movie will document how the networked world is changing our lives.

As much about what the web is now as what it will become, the project will show the ways in which people are using the power of networks to create community and transform society in unexpected ways. The Web Made Movie will focus on what the Network looks like offline - to show how it is connecting community, altering our relationship to knowledge and power, and re-wiring our brains. The WebMadeMovie will ultimately celebrate how the Internet is less a machine created by a select few brilliant minds, but is in fact shaped by everyone.

Framework

The WebMadeMovie is an umbrella project for multiple initiatives that aim to produce not one but multiple films, interactive documentaries, short-form episodes and software projects. It is an initiative to encourage commons-based production and develop the tools to make that happen.

The project will be bootstrapped by a team of international documentary filmmakers who will shoot initial episodes and serve as moderators of key episodes. Each filmmaker will bring a slant, a vision and a community to the project in addition to the original material that they will shoot and produce for their respective episode.

They will manage the communities that sprout up around their episodes and bring their own communities. In this way the project will have a pluralized, international spirit with wildly divergent aesthetics, processes and perspectives. Just like the web.

In addition to the series of episodes, a "release" version will be edited together to create a feature length film, which will be toured to international film festivals and broadcast on TV networks and spread to P2P networks in a finished state. If the community building the film is large and lively enough, multiple releases may be made over time.

Platforms + Communities

The collaborative filmmaking website OpenSourceCinema.org will be used to solicit uploading and remixing of video, images and audio material from web users. Using the task-based system of Open Source Cinema each episode will be built in a participatory manner. The WebMadeMovie will benefit from the 5000 strong Open Source Cinema user base, a group of passionate collaborators who already succeeded in creating the award winning "Rip! A Remix Manifesto:.

Joining this community will be thousands of Mozillians who join the project from Mozilla Drumbeat - an international effort to "enable internet users to understand, participate and take control of their online lives". Leveraging this vast userbase, the project will have a global reach and impact, and empower Mozillians to create a participatory culture project with the same ambition and scope as Firefox.

Technology

OpenSourceCinema.org is currently in active beta and will leverage the WebMadeMovie to improve integration of the Kaltura web-based editing software. Functionality currently exists to upload and edit audiovisual material, import from youtube + flicker. Open Source Cinema also has an efficient task-based collaboration system for soliciting and tracking contributions.

The WebMadeMovie will also produce a robust data layer on top of video. Working with developers to create software to take advantage of HTML5 video and other technologies, the project will allow viewers and community members to mix video, social media and data from across the web in real time. Annotating video with URLs, tagging videos, and integrating data from feeds, and things we haven't thought of yet are ways in which the data layer. The goal will be to keep nimble and generative: as open video practices and technology evolve, so will the project. The blue sky vision would be the creation of a living documentary, a wiki-type experience that can be changed and morphed through user contributions.

How does this make the web better?

As it unfolds, this 'web made movie' will:

  1. Remind the world that the web public commons by focusing on everyday people creating things at the edge of the network. It will NOT be interviews with web stars and geeks - it will be every day people who are building the web by using it.
  2. Show the creative potential of open HTML5 video by building a high profile participatory project that blends video clips, social media and data from across the web. At both the technical and creative level, it will demonstrate the online video is more than 'tv on a computer'.
  3. Advance the field of 'open source cinema', pushing the envelope of collaborative online movie by drawing on experience from RIP, GCBC and Mozilla.

Participation asks

  • Contributions from working filmmakers
    • Recruited from colleagues, "professional" filmmakers will seed the project with exciting and engaging work
    • Creating core story lines and episodes to prime the pump
    • Editing and refining materials into compelling media experience (release version and episodes)
      • The filmmakers become DJs or curators of the whole experience
  • Contributions from "amateurs" (those who do it for the love of it)
    • photos
    • videos
    • the soundtrack
    • storylines and shoot suggestions
    • edits and remixes
    • subtitles and localization
  • Everyone on the web
    • Participating via all sorts of social media
    • Layering on annotations, tweets, images, etc.
    • Communities and conversations form around episodes

Content and Episodes

Drafting the content and focus of the project will be a community effort, and specific effort will be made to ensure episodes are diverse and global. Stories we are searching for are character based, in the "real world", and focus on action and verité rather than strictly interviews.

Some examples of content areas currently being researched:

  • The Iranian twitter revolution
  • China's firewall
  • Brazil's Pontos de Cultura
  • Homeless bloggers in Vancouver's Downtown East Side
  • Studies of Digital Natives at Harvard
  • Rise of the IndieRock Super Star
  • MakerCulture invents the Replicator

People

Brett Gaylor, filmmaker, Rip! A Remix Manifesto Henrik Moltke, filmmaker, Good Copy Bad Copy Mark Surman, ED, Mozilla

Donation Target and Ask

  • Dollar amounts and campaigns TBD
  • Online fundraising via Drumbeat
    • a loose goal of 20% of the project raised online

Toolset and Platform

  • Project mgmnt, publicity, community recruitment and fundraising using Drumbeat
  • Participation, production and distribution on OpenSourceCinema.org

Timeline and Milestones

  • Tied in part to Drumbeat rollout
  • First call for participation and trailer Q1 2010?
    • Fundraising push follows this
  • First 'episode' Q2 2010? ROFLCon?

Current challenges and questions

  • Film projects are expensive. It needs support from broadcasters and funding agencies, who are typically scared of Open Video
  • Open Video technology is immature - need support in developing tools to make a truly collaborative documentary a reality.
    • This means having both film and open web tech people on the lead creative them. At least one smart open web hacker has to be a core part of this team.
Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Drumbeat/Challenges/webmademovie&oldid=204447"