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Creative Commons Filmmaking Remixes Modern Cinema
mjeppsen writes, "Filmmaking experiment A Swarm Of Angels aims to create and distribute the first collaborative film released under a Creative Commons license. The project is using community participation and funding to make a film that would traditionally cost $3–4 million for a mere $1.75 million. The entire filmmaking process will be collaborative, from Wiki-based script creation to community voting on creative and marketing decisions. Is this just a scheme by the filmmakers to get funding for a pet project, or is it Hollywood's worst nightmare? More importantly, can 'open-source films' develop into a sustainable financial model?"
Wiki-based script creation
I don't doubt that you could get an OK or even good script by committee, but I think to get a great movie, you need one mind unhindered by others. (But you also get A LOT more junk that way)
I wish them luck, but this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me for a variety of reasons.
1) Most of the public will never hear about this. This means that those who do know about it and participate are unlikely to have what for lack of a better term I will call "common tastes". I can just imagine one faction pushing to make this "gay friendly", another wanting to take potshots at religious people, and so on.
2) The quality of the acting may be low. Cheap films don't necessarily have to have bad actors. The first Phantasm movie was made in the 1970s on a fairly cheap budget, yet if you watch it, the special effects look good for the time and the acting is fine. The Blair Witch Project is another example of a cheap movie with decent acting. Examples of cheap movies AND bad acting would be to watch most of the fan produced Star Wars or Star Trek shows. Go to http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ and pick any episode, especially in season 1 or 2, and watch it and tell me if you would pay to see that kind of work at a cinema. The special effects are fine, but the acting? That's another story. I just have visions of this kind of project being doomed by the producers casting their buddies who can't act in the movie.
3) Just because people on Slashdot think it's a great idea, that doesn't mean the general public will concur. Serenity didn't even make back its production cost with US and international box office sales put together, yet Slashdot was filled with postings from people who could barely keep from masturbating as they wrote about how great the movie was going to be. According to the reviews it was a great film (I never saw it so I can't say), but nobody wanted to see it. Snakes On A Plane was another movie that nobody went to see, yet it might have life on home video. Army Of Darkness is one of my all time favorite movies, yet as actor Bruce Campbell has said, while the people who love AOD really really love it with all their hearts, the fact is that there aren't enough of them to justify the costs of making another one in the series. Bruce will release a movie where some people mistake him (the actor) for the Ash character and get him to help them fight some monsters and that's probably as close as we'll ever get to a real sequel to the Evil Dead/Army Of Darkness series.
4) As a general rule in Hollywood, the more people who touch the script, the more problems there are. What's to keep a sufficiently organized faction from controlling the wiki process? Suppose instead of my examples in point #1 that a group of Christian zealots organized (and believe it or not, dedicated Christians often do organize very well) themselves and could control the wiki and wanted to put in religious themes that would doom the movie financially. Would the producers then overrule the majority? Why have a wiki process if you're just going to ignore it? Would they go ahead and put stuff in the movie that they know will keep it from making a profit just because the majority of participants want it?
5) Suppose the producers/director/people running the show are idiots? Do you not know that studies have shown that the most incompetent people are the most confident in their own abilities? Take a look at the film Ed Wood from Tim Burton for an idea of how an extremely untalented man could believe very strongly in his own talent, despite all the negative pressure (poor sales, poor reviews) he got while making films. He convinced himself that he was a genius and nobody else really understood him, so he ignored all the negative reinforcement he got while making films.
To me, this just smacks of the idealistic "Hey kids! Let's go make a movie!" idea that is not grounded in reality. Again, I wish them luck, but I don't see how this is going to work.