Limitless Collaboration

I've been reading a bit about two really interesting projects recently, both of which aim to harness the amazing possibility to collaborate on a massive scale that has been created by new media and social media. They're actually both fairly similar in what they're trying to do, so much so that you'd wonder if one was inspired by the other.

The first one is a film from Irish filmmaker Frank Kelly and is inspired by Twitter and the 140 characters you're allowed per tweet. It's called '140' and is a feature length movie cut together from 140 individual clips, each 140 seconds long and shot by 140 filmmakers (ranging from absolute beginners to professionals) all over the world at the exact same time on the exact same night in the summer of 2009. The theme for the videos was 'connection.' I had originally signed up to take part in it but had to pull out because I ended up having to work when it was supposed to be shot. I'm raging now because I think it would have been great to be part of such an interesting and novel project. It's such a simple yet powerful concept.

140 has been doing the rounds on the festival circuit and seems to have been very well received. It actually recently won what I think is its first award - a Bronze Palm at the Mexico International Festival.

I haven't actually seen the full film yet but the trailer looks interesting:



The second one is somewhat similar but will most likely gain far more attention because it was produced by none other than Ridley Scott. It's called 'Life in a Day' and uses Youtube as its foundation. Several thousand people all uploaded a video of their day on 24th July last year. Those hours and hours of footage were then edited into a feature length movie. Judging from the trailer it looks to be a slightly slicker production than 140 but when you compare an independent filmmaker from Ireland to someone like Ridley Scott then you're not really comparing like with like.

Life in a Day has generated quite a buzz at several high-profile festivals such as Sundance, Berlin and SXSW. As far as I know it's set for a US cinema release later this year, not sure about a European one though.



Not having seen either of these movies yet it will be interesting to see whether or not they're interesting enough and can create enough of a narrative from such random and disparate footage to hold the viewers attention for 90-odd minutes. Hopefully they can. They're two excellent examples of the type of possibilities that have been opened up by new media channels and social networks, creating the type of work that wasn't possible less than ten years ago and with people with whom you'd never have a chance to work with were it not for these exciting media. I'm sure there are hundreds of other examples of similar types of projects that I've not come across.

It's an exciting time to be a part of the creative arts, it's an exciting time to be online and it's an exciting time to be making connections with people.