Collaborative Film Making

Deptford.TV is a website and project that creates a community of media sharing from content produced primarily in the Deptford area of London. Media can be uploaded and then "regenerated" and remixed by the users within the community.

I like the idea behind the closed aspect of a community solely focussed on remixing material sourced from a specific area, although it's proven in my opinion that the wider the reach the more impressive the result as shown with YouTube.

A series of CCTV recording in downtown Linz, Austria. The narrative is focused on generating awareness on invasive surveillance technologies.

Filming of a storm over Deptford which has then been remixed and edited with colour enhancements and psychedelic effects.

Star Wreck Studios, based in Tampere, Finland, has created a permanent community for collaborative film making. Titled Wreck-a-Movie, it acts as a permanent community site for movie-making collaborators. In early August of 2008, the community was working on two projects: "a science fiction comedy about Nazis on the moon, Iron Sky and a horror film called Sauna." Iron Sky and Sauna were written by professional script writers. The community participates by commenting and discussing the script. The production leader decides what is used in the creation based on the comments and ideas discussed on a forum. The company aspires to "take a community of thousands of online movie-making buffs, and have them collaborate on a feature-length film." Anybody interested in film can join the community and create plot and music proposals as well as comment on scenes.

"Man with a Movie Camera" is a project created by artist Perry Bard. The 1929 Dziga Vertov film of the same name is recreated each day with user submitted scene re-recordings. Users are invited to interpret Vertov's work and upload their footage to the site to become part of the database. Software developed specifically for the project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film.

A similar project to Wreak-A-Movie although the intent here is to remake and re-interpret old work where as Wreak-A-Movie encourages wholly new pieces of work.

Cinelerra is an open-soure, freeware video editing application. Similar to the way GIMP acts as a replacement for Photoshop, Cinelerra aims to remove the need for Final Cut, Adobe Premiere etc as well as taking a unique non-linear approach to video editing.

Cinecutie is another freeware video editing application although it is built upon the original source code from Cinelerra. Highlighting the benefits for the end-user in terms of refined apps and choice thanks to open source initiatives.

In a Final Cut Pro session we learnt the basic of using the timeline to cut and reorder video. I recorded my own simple test video on my iPhone and experimented with various effects, transitions and type treatments with the piece. Skills I would later apply to other peoples videos in an attempt to remix them.

Above, the original, simple clip recorded to be used for editing and experimentation.

I set the type in the centre of the frame and then began to alter edit the motion attributes as the timeline progressed. Pure experimentation where I assigned random data to each option, creating the woozy, disjointed effect on the text.

Above, a screenshot of the timeline after multiple copy and pasting experiments using different filters and type effects on the footage.

Here is the final clip I produced at the end of the session. Looping the clip four times, each one being completely altered and stripped down.