looking at collaborative creativity in film

today it hit me that collaborative filmmaking is becoming bigger and bigger! Sure, it’s partly a momentary trend but I’m sure it will bloom and take on many new forms in the future. In a common form, collaborative filmmaking involves many users acting out the same scene. Then all these scenes are mounted together to create the impression of something like a chain reaction.

One of the early examples of this is a film initiated by gmail:

More recently, the passing away of M.J. inspired fans to do the ‘eternal moonwalk‘…

… Then, there have been examples of entire, feature film length movies being mounted together out of a mass of user-generated material. German Director Detlev Buck for instance produced the soccer documentary ’23 days’ relying only on the home-made film material submitted by fans.

But this is all basically old-school. I want to point out two more collaborative film projects which seem quite exiting to me.

One is a music video which involves a super creative use of multiple split screens, with people interacting across the frames… beautifully artistic!

The second is the monumental and slightly insane idea to re-create an entire Star Wars film by letting fans re-interpret single scenes which are finally mounted together again. The project runs under the name Star Wars uncut. The site is very well done and seems simple to use… fans pick the scene they wish to work with and upload their clip to the site once its done. Star Wars fans tend to be insane – all the scenes have been claimed already… so all we can do now is to wait for the result!