Interview for Film School Thesis about the Potential of Crowd-sourced Movie Making

Here is an email interview with Jessica who is currently working on her bachelor's thesis on "Collaborative Film-making on the internet focused on its potential and power of influence."

Q: Who are the brains behind MoviePals? How big is your team? 

A: The core technical and creative team behind MoviePals Entertainment currently consists of just four people: me (Solomon Rothman), Brian Bentow, Hilary Law, and Israel Rothman. With its diverse background, the team brings together a broad set of skills that include video production, screenwriting, graphic design, sales, and software development. I am the only member of the core team with any prior filmmaking experience. I plan to leverage my experience leading teams in creating collaborative, open-source films that have been seen millions of times and have been mentioned in both the independent and mainstream press to build the largest collaborative, film-making team ever assembled. 

Q: Are you filmmakers/ do you have any experience in that sector? 

A: Our filmmaking team includes individuals with extensive filmmaking experience including credits from Hollywood and traditional productions working alongside amateurs and newcomers. There are recent film school graduates, SAG actors, and Hollywood writers working alongside aspiring actors, budding screenwriters, and self-taught video-editors. It is really a diverse group of people. Each member of the team can supply his/her talents, skills, equipment, props, and locations to be used in film projects in exchange for a revenue share. Everyone is invited to participate. You CAN join our film-making team right now! How big is our team? It is growing by the day and we can’t wait to see what people come up with and decide to make together.

Q: What inspired you to create MoviePals/ Mob Mentality?

A: This bio video contains a good explanation of what lead me to start MoviePals and get excited about the possibilities of Open Cinema.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f8hg3apmGU

In short, after a bout of inspiration and without prior filmmaking experience, I created a full-length feature film in 3 months on a budget of $200.  I put that film online and released the source files for other artists to re-edit and re-interpret.  That film, The Boy Who Never Slept, was seen millions of times and resulted in hundreds of e-mails from aspiring filmmakers, international press and was the beginning of the journey that lead to MoviePals and Mob Mentality.

That success inspired me to create more movies using collaboration through harnessing the power of the internet.  Eventually, this positive energy and momentum transformed into a full-fledged movement with the ambitious goal of revolutionizing the way the way films are made by building the world’s largest collaborative filmmaking team and giving the audience a chance to participate!

If you want to know more specifics about the history you can watch the bio video and read this company history article that gives some more information about how I met my CTO and the evolution of some of our ideas.

http://moviepals.org/premium/moviepals-open-cinema-everyone/spark/moviepalsorg-launches-%E2%80%9Ccrowd-driven-movie-community%E2%80%9D-cr

Q: When did Moviepals/Mob Mentality official launch?

A: MoviePals Entertainment is just over 1 year old.  In October 2009, we officially announced the Mob Mentality series for the first time along with our intention of building a collaborative web platform to facilitate its creation. The initial team was small and we were able to experiment with many new ideas. Eventually, we developed what we believe to be a sustainable and commercially-viable method of doing collaborative cinema.

Q: What's happening right now and in the measurable future?

A: At the present time, we’re preparing to release our first episodes. At the same time, we are  working on new episodes, building the team, and having creative, working meetings with artists from all over the world.

Q: What are the goals of Mob Mentality?

A: In addition to creating a captivating story-line and web series, we believe that Mob Mentality will demonstrate that our collaborative model and platform can produce commercially-viable, collaborative film projects. The long-term vision is to create a platform that brings together people with the passion, talent, and experience to make movies and ideas that they care about and make money while doing it. With that goal in mind, we planned to create a profitable web series with innovative and novel ways to encourage and leverage audience participation and international collaboration. 

Q: What does crowd-driven exactly mean in the Mob Mentality project?

A: Mob Mentality is crowd-driven in the following ways:

1. The creation of the episodes is being crowd-sourced. Everything from the equipment, locations, and props to the screenwriting, acting, and video-editing used in the episodes are being supplied by the MoviePals film-making community.
2. We are taking feedback and input from the audience through the use of polls and interactive missions that accompany the episodes. For example, audience members can vote on what they want to happen and take on missions to promote the series and share creative ideas.

Q: How many contributors do you think will take part and what roles are available for them?

A: As of today, the number of people who are actively working on Mob Mentality episodes is about 50. We expect several hundred to several thousand people to take part in the series across all disciplines including acting, screen-writing, musical composition, directing, costume designers, and more.

Q: Can you tell me some more about the (collaboration) tools you're going to use on the platform?

A: We currently have groups, forums, blogs, and collaborative, wiki-like documents. On our roadmap, we have collaborative character and plot “bibles”, screenplay tracking, and browser- based video editing. We are taking an iterative approach, noting what works, and letting the community help drive the functionality of the platform.

Q: There's a Manifesto on your platform. What purposes does it have? Why do users have to sign it and why is it there?

A: The Manifesto is on the front page of the website to make it easy for people to understand and show support for what we stand for and determine if they would fit in with our collaborative team.

The Manifesto contains the core ideas and beliefs of Open Cinema, our model of collaborative film-making. Initially, we really struggled getting people to work together in a positive, constructive, collaborative environment. People came to us who wanted to make movies. However, their views on collaboration, sharing, and openness were not aligned with the grass-roots, low-budget film projects that we were working on. If people truly understand and believe in the Manifesto, we believe that they can be productive members of the team. If, for example, they don’t think that collaboration can make things better or require a large budget, then they probably won’t fit well with the team and may be better in a system with a large budget and more top-down control. At the end of the day, whether or not you like a film is subjective. We need to realize that even if some people hate what someone creates, as long as enough people like it, it still has value.

The Manifesto doesn’t just focus on the positive beliefs of Open Cinema. It also discusses the limitations of the current filmmaking system which we have named the Control. For people who are uninformed and do not see the negative side effects of the current system, we clearly outline the downsides of the Control.  Under the Control, artists are exploited, people are not able to freely work together, some individuals’ contributions are extremely overvalued, and the creative direction of a project is often dictated by powerful studios and financiers instead of its creators.

Even if you, like me, love some of the movies that come out of the current system, you would not want to be a starving artist limited to their system. We want people to know that there is another option for them to make a living doing what they love. The only thing holding them back is believing in themselves and believing in others. The reality is that there is tons of underutilized talent and equipment and stories left untold. Why not work together, make some movies, have some fun, and make some money while doing it? 

Open Cinema is bigger than a single project, brand, website, or even a community. We support Open Cinema as a philosophy even as applied by other people and communities who are not part of our team.

Q: How do you evaluate the (future) potential (success, popularity, amount of productions) of film projects like Mob Mentality compared to mainstream Hollywood productions?

A: As you imply by your question, we will not be measuring ourselves using the same criteria used to measure large-scale Hollywood productions. We will be looking at how we are received by bloggers and press, how many people view and comment on our videos, the revenue generated from selling merchandise, advertising, and commercials, etc. 

From a community perspective, we will be measuring team and audience participation, the number and quality of ideas that are submitted, and the quantity and quality of the community’s talent and equipment submissions.

Q: Do you see any advantages on sides of collaborative filmmaking?

A: Collaborative film-making and Open Cinema are relatively new and most of the advantages have yet to be seen in practice. However, we believe that using collaboration we will be able to try out tons of new ideas and innovate as the upfront cost of creating movies is minimal. Moreover, we believe that as more people are involved in the film-making process, new stories and new voices will be heard. On the income side, we believe that more people will be able to generate side or even full-time income doing what they love. Finally, we believe that collaborative filmmaking has the potential to crush traditional methods for creating movies in terms of quality, quantity, speed, and cost.