Collaborative Film-Making: The Basement Tapes And The New Wave Of Online Movie Mash-Ups

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Want to see your online video mash-ups up there on the silver screen? The Basement Tapes is a collaborative documentary all about the changing face of copyright in the digital era, created by its online audience via video-sharing and remixing, an evolving online script powered by wiki-technology, and the rising new media form of the mash-up.

Mash-up and remix culture are redefining the way that we interact with the media. Audiences today are no longer interested in sitting back and passively consuming bland, homogenous mass media, and are instead turning to participatory culture, aided by the new breed of social web applications.

The Basement Tapes is an excellent case in point, encouraging its audience to play an integral role in shaping an evolving documentary movie by submitting or remixing video and audio content over the web. With a thriving online community based at OpenSourceCinema.org, The Basement Tapes is a project dedicated to using the tools of the emergent participatory culture to explore the history and thinking behind it.

Destined to become a feature documentary in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada, the film is set for release on the Documentary Channel and in theatres in Spring 2008, but is also firmly rooted in the web. This is not a case of a watered-down content-lite version of a movie finding its way onto the Internet, but rather a project designed to grow from the ground up.

The website features both raw footage that users can watch and download, and user-generated remixes of this footage for all to see. Furthermore, The Basement Tapes has a script open to the contributions of its readers, in the fashion of the collaborative culture success story Wikipedia, and even a manifesto for this new breed of web-enabled film-making.

With free culture icons Lawrence Lessig and Jimmy Wales already on-board, alongside musicians including the Ninja Tunes collective known as DJ Food and electronica envelope-pusher Girl Talk, you could be next.

Participatory media take center stage

Whether sharing and remixing videos online, collaborating on music and art projects from different sides of the planet, or entering a global conversation through their blogs, the Web 2.0 crowd are taking media into their own hands.

But while organizations like the Creative Commons attempt to make the sharing, remixing and passing on of participatory culture a legal reality, there are still stake-holders in big media with their own agenda.

If you haven't heard about the RIAA and their endless law-suits against grandmothers, college students and children unwise enough to get caught downloading mp3s, you might well have encountered the MPAA and their fight to rid the world of movie piracy.

The recording and movie industries are fighting a some-would-argue losing battle against changing attitudes towards intellectual property, by suing file-sharers and those that infringe on copyright laws. And in the process, argue their opposition, they are crushing the future of creativity.

The Basement Tapes is firmly grounded in the thinking of Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor and father of the Creative Commons movement.

In this first clip from The Basement Tapes open archive, you are given a mashed-up four-minute introduction to Lawrence Lessig, the Creative Commons and the work being produced in the evolving remix-based video culture:

Open Sourcing Cinema

The Basement Tapes doesn't stand alone in embracing this evolving cultural paradigm, however, but is adding something fresh to a growing tradition of films and film-makers taking an Open Source approach to the creative process. The days of the auteur director look soon to be replaced by the mob-authored movie.

Recent examples of cinema opened up to its audience include The Echo Chamber, a collaborative exposé documentary on the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq War; Robin Good's The Weblog Project, an Open Source film created and remixed for bloggers, and by bloggers; Stray Cinema, which has opened its raw footage up to the public via its website; The Digital Tipping Point, an Open Source documentary about Open Source, each segment of which can be downloaded from the Internet Archive for remixing; and ongoing open source feature film project A Swarm Of Angels.

As this growing trend shows, film-makers are increasingly starting to question the Hollywood model as the only legitimate way to make movies, with its top-down approach to both media creation and consumption. The Basement Tapes is no exception, placing the audience at the center of its endeavor.

This is a great example of form following function - a film exploring the evolving participatory culture and its changing attitudes towards copyright law, making use of that very culture to bring its message to life.

So how does it set about that?

OpenSourceCinema.org

''Copyright Is Theft!

Every time we copyright a work, we are robbing from the Public Domain. We are denying others the freedom to share the ideas we have given life to. We are denying others the freedom to build on our ideas.

Yes, Copyright in some sense is necessary. It is an incentive to create, to encourage "the progress of science and useful arts" . But when it is the life of the author, plus 75 years? That's a theft of our collective heritage.''

Brett Gaylor, Open Source Cinema manifesto

So begins the Open Source Cinema manifesto, perhaps the key document of what is fast evolving into an active video-sharing space. The idea is simple - copyright may be necessary in some form, but as it stands today things have been taken too far.

If it was easier to uphold copyright law in the age of mass media, things have become a lot more difficult in recent times. Digital information is by its very nature promiscuous, and the companies succeeding in the evolving Web 2.0 landscape are those maximizing the opportunities available for the easy-sharing and portability of online media. Audiences won't stand for the locked-up-tight walled-garden approach any longer - they want to take part, and they want to share the resulting media freely.

From the first moment of landing on the OpenSourceCinema.org home-page, this participatory, open-sharing dimension of the project becomes evident.

You are immediately presented with an opportunity to create or consume media, to sign up and take part in a film-making community, and a tightly-edited introduction to what the whole project is about. In this video trailer for the project, you have the chance to see if it is something you want to play a part in right from the word go.

In a little over three minutes, this mash-up tour of the issues behind the movie boils down its key ideas in an inventive and highly approachable form. Here we have web video doing what it does best - cutting to the quick and delivering its message with a punch. See for yourself:

If that gets you hooked you can set about:

• Looking into the thinking behind the project via the Open Source Cinema manifesto
• Checking out the latest scenes in progress, that you can download, remix and re-publish to the website
• Reading or contributing to the open, wiki-based script for The Basement Tapes feature-length documentary
• Browsing the latest videos uploaded to the project, divided into raw footage on the left and user-created remixes on the right. You can also browse by tag cloud

True to its open, Web 2.0 roots the Open Source Cinema website makes much of user comments, and displays the latest remixes, members, comments and raw footage in a side bar right up there on the home-page. This, along with the encouragement to sign up and take part in the active video-sharing community gives Open Source Cinema a social dimension that will be key to its success or failure as a project.

Judging by the sheer amount of user activity, and the impressive volume of mash-up videos, it seems as if this community has already taken off. In actual fact, even if you are not interested in actively participating in remixing elements of the film, Open Source Cinema makes for a great resource for those looking to check out the latest developments in the mash-up genre of web video.

Beyond the site itself the Open Source Cinema project takes full advantage of the viral power of both a YouTube and MySpace presence in an effort to further reach out to potential audiences and contributors. This is a wise move that could well pay off in terms of drawing attention and traffic from these quintessential social media destinations.

Room for improvement

Open Source Cinema is a totally free service with a strong focus on underground media, Open Source culture and the process of getting a film made collaboratively. I think that it could be a lot more, and outlive the film project that it was set up to promote and create, given that it is fast becoming a destination for video mash-ups ill-served elsewhere on the web.

To really pull this off though, Open Source Cinema would need to smooth out some significant rough edges. For one thing, navigation of the videos is less than intuitive, and by bundling raw footage and remixes together in long line ups, I can't help but feel that this could be better executed.

The other thing that puzzles me is that a project dedicated to remixing video is not making use of a service like Jumpcut or EyeSpot to serve and share its videos. While Blip.TV is well established and capable of putting out good quality video, it has nothing in the way of remixing tools, and even makes sharing and embedding videos difficult. Furthermore a lot of the user-submitted videos are in a mixture of Quicktime and Windows Media formats, neither of which have the browser penetration of Flash video.

Making it as easy as possible for users to both share the videos featured on the site, and quickly set about creating their own remixes, without having to go through the download and upload process seems like a no-brainer to me, but maybe there is something I'm missing.

Conclusions

Open Source Cinema is all-at-once a:

• Feature documentary movie about changing attitudes to copyright laws, set to be aired on television and in movie theaters in 2008
• An active video sharing and remixing destination
• A social network built around the mash-up genre of Internet video and music
• A bold attempt to challenge traditional film-making practices by opening up the entire creative process to the public, bringing the movie into the Open Source sharing space

Firmly rooted in the emergent underground media bubbling up all across the web, and the re-thinking of intellectual property brought about through the Creative Commons licenses, Open Source Cinema is an effort to explore these ideas from the inside-out.

For rather than trying to discuss copyright and its head-on collision with the remix culture from an outsider, objective perspective, Open Source Cinema attempts to use participatory media to tell the story from the front-line. The idea is simple - users can edit the film script, upload raw footage and edit and remix one another's work, the best of which will find itself aired on TV and playing in movie theaters.

As the Open Source idea spreads beyond software into the realms of cultural production, so we are seeing projects like Open Source Cinema showcasing and enabling the work of their audiences, rather than handing them a finished product and expecting them to passively consume it. Video continues to grow as the defining medium of the new web, and we can expect to see a lot more of this two-way, participatory media in the future.

Open Source Cinema is one of the projects paving the way.

Additional Resources

If you would like to learn more about the Open Source Cinema project, and other projects tapping into Open Source culture in the film-making process, you might want to check out the following links:

• The Open Source Cinema website
• The Open Source Cinema blog
• Robin Good's The Weblog Project, an open source movie about and made by bloggers from around the world
• The Echo Chamber Project, an Open Source collaborative documentary on the Bush Administration in the lead up to the Iraq war
• Stray Cinema, a London-based Open Source movie open to being remixed by its audience, before being screened in top cinemas around the UK Capital
• The Digital Tipping Point, a film open to audience remixing, made available through the Internet Archive

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and originally published as: "Online Movie Mash-Ups And The New Wave Of Collaborative Digital Film-Making: The Basement Tapes"