Change in Web Made Movies focus

June 14, 2010

Web Made Movies was originally conceived as a frankenstein mashup of content and software - the idea being to create a documentary about the idea of the Open Web using the Open Web. You can see from our original roadmap that it was meant to be an episodic documentary series.

The more I began to think about this, though, I realized it was still a very old-school way to make a documentary. It was top down - come up with an idea, execute it, deliver it. It wasn’t very web-like - there wasn’t a lot of room for an agile thought process that could change, accept input from anyone, and be infinitely changeable, linkable, and remixable. I think the reason why it was conceived this way is because online video has not evolved.

In the 15 or so years that the web has been a mainstream part of our lives, video has been held back. Consider how much the web has changed in that time - no one could have anticipated WikiPedia, social networking, twitter, ebay, craigslist - and the degree to which these things have changed our lives. Yet video is still stuck in the same crummy box - we use language like “embedded” to describe the way we shoe-horn video into a web page with conversions and plugins. Video on the web is unaware of, and uninterested in, all of the other data and information on a page. Its video on the web, not video of the web.

We need to make video a first class citizen of the web, that behaves like the rest of the web: remixable, hackable, linkable, searchable. We need video that integrates Twitter feeds, Google maps, Wikipedia articles. We need a video environment where tomorrow’s filmmakers can “view source”. We need to let video catch up to the rest of the web and deliver on the potential of an interactive medium that celebrates participation over consumption. And the way towards this is to encourage an open practice of filmmaking that is as open, participatory and generative as the rest of the web.

That’s why Web Made Movies is focusing on the development of an innovation lab bringing together filmakers and software developers to explore how openness can have a fundamental impact on our definition of video. Can interacting with the semantic data provide a new experience? Can online video provide a leap in filmmaking on a comparable scale to Vertov experimenting with montage, or the freedom that 16mm cameras gave to the pioneers of Cinema Verité?

We’ve got practical ideas of how to get there, and they’re summed up in our new roadmap for the project. But on a broad level, here’s what we want to do:

-work with students at Seneca College’s Center for Development of Open Technology to develop popcorn.js, a javascript library for HTML5 video

-Bring together filmmakers and software developers at 4 meeting points around the world in content and software “sprints” to hack collaboratively

-Show via practical, narrative based examples why open video matters

With this new change in directions are new ways to get involved. You can visit our Drumbeat page for details on how to work with us on IRC, attend a local event, join the mailing list, or propose a project.

This is not to say that the project is no longer focused on content - quite the contrary. What I hope will be our success is showing why openness can evolve the narrative of video - and to that end, we want to work closely with filmmakers of all kinds. If you have a film project that would make sense within this lab, please contact us and join our community. Sky’s the limit!