As I told Lance, I’m very proud to be a part of The Workbook Project. It is a unique resource in the indie filmmaking community and I look forward to helping expand its reach.

If you have a project, the motivation to blog about it and embrace all things DIY, send me an email.

SABI PICTURES plans to incorporate an elevated level of collaboration on its upcoming WANDERLUST feature-length motion picture by enlisting the talents of its audience/community and creative partnerships with other filmmakers.

Here’s the article…

The age of public collaboration over the Internet is still only in its infancy, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP in an interview.
The 42-year-old web guru, in an effort to show Wikipedia’s impact thus far, referenced a recent trip to a slum in India where he “met this young man on the street who told me that he had used Wikipedia to pass his 11th grade exams.”

“Wow, that’s really cool, right? We’ve had some impact, even in such a place where I’m talking to this guy, and there’s mud streets, and cows, and it’s really quite a different environment from London.”

Wales’s popular online encyclopedia allows anyone with an Internet connection to make entries and edit content.

Speaking on the sidelines of an awards ceremony in London, Wales said: “We’re really just at the beginning, still, of collaborative efforts.”

“In video, right now, we’re still back in many ways in the Web 1.0 era,” he said, referring to the age before so-called Web 2.0, the peer-sharing model of the Internet of which Wikipedia is almost the definitive example.

“If you look at almost everything on YouTube, it’s individuals doing videos, either funny cat videos, or drunk girl videos seem to be quite popular there,” he said with a smile.

“What we haven’t seen yet in video is large-scale collaborative projects.”

Off the top of his head Wales suggested a 90-minute collaborative web video created by interviewing people from all around the world, giving their views on the war in Iraq.

He joked: “This isn’t going to be that popular, frankly, a 90-minute movie with people talking about Iraq — it’s going to have a small audience. This can’t be produced in the old-fashioned way. It’s totally possible now.

“That’s just one dumb idea of mine, right? Imagine what we could get if we could get 100,000 people thinking about collaborative video efforts to create documentary films, or comedy, or art, or who knows what.

“So, I think we’ve still got a long way to go.”

He acknowledged collaboration has its limits, noting that if “we said we want to write a novel about loss, and redemption, probably not so much public collaboration, that’s really an individual vision and a view of the world.”

“But for basic factual information, I think having an open public dialogue and debate and democratic process, seems to be very powerful.”

Wales also warned that major steps had to be considered to stop governments abusing ordinary people’s personal information, which is increasingly stored in vast computer databases.

He described potential government misuse of private citizens’ data as a “concern.”

“One of the interesting things to really think about is how, as we’re using the Internet, we leave an enormous digital footprint everywhere,” he said.

“And not just the Internet, but cell phones, everything else. I’m assuming, if anybody really cares enough, my movements all around the planet are pretty trackable by somebody.

“That’s something most people don’t think much about, and they don’t think much about it because, frankly, no one cares what most people are doing.”

He said, however, that as computing power increases, “we need to really think about what are the political controls we need to have in place to prevent governments from abusing that kind of information.”

Wales’s remarks come after a report last month which warned that European governments are rapidly eroding civil liberties in a bid to gain “unfettered” access to individuals’ personal data in the name of tighter security.

The document by Statewatch, a non-profit online civil liberties monitoring group, criticised the EU for viewing data protection and judicial scrutiny of citizens’ private information as “obstacles” to law enforcement.

And so I come to this… METADATA. At the recent Power to the Pixel conference, this topic was on everyone’s mind. A special think tank I sat in on and observed was put together to address this and other challenges the DIY filmmaking community faces.

How to collect it, what info could be useful to collect, is anybody out there already doing it — these are the questions they asked and we will be asking as this movement evolves. For lack of a better term, I’m using From Here To Awesome to describe this movement from now on. forget the first incarnation of FHTA as an online festival of sorts. It is evolving into something bigger, more inclusive. this new wave is what I will continue to blog about so everything will go under my “from here to awesome” category if you wish to follow these articles.

Would a universal form be ideal? Like what Without A Box did for film festival submissions – fill it out with all your film’s info then open it up to your audience like a Wiki? obviously the tech for something like this is not in place, but I imagine there are ways to do it. perhaps by embedding the metadata into the files of the film, like that which is done with mp3s.

Thinking about this, I pose the question to you… what metadata could be useful for filmmakers who want to sell DVDs, hold screenings, use brand integration, solicit advertisers? And how do we collect it?

If today we are “Here” and our goal is to get to “Awesome”, i think we are right on the brink of the next “ipod moment” — a moment that changes the way content finds its audience. today’s independent filmmaker is moving closer to what we at Sabi Pictures call the interdependent filmmaker — one who embraces the value of community-based solutions for everything from education and production needs to sharing your audience with like-minded artists. my vision of “awesome” is a universal framework that supports the artist and his or her audience cyclicly. allowing the filmmaker to retain ownership of his or her work is paramount to the evolving models of distribution and I believe that Arin Crumley’s idea for a universal distribution agreement is a brilliant concept for defining a new relationship between filmmakers and outlets. the technology is such that the only thing holding back the low budget (yet equally skilled, compelling and entertaining) filmmaker from monetizing their efforts is an audience equipped with the tools to find them.

Being a part of the first wave of the FHTA project has been a massive awakening and education in terms of elevating my understanding of what can be done with a motion picture once it’s locked and ready for the world. It has emboldened me to truly take ownership of my films, to give myself permission to fail, to assert and define my place in the film world, to brave the ever-evolving models of self-distribution and to have courage in rejecting the conventional route toward distribution for independents such as myself.

the distribution opportunities provided by FHTA were not an end result in and of themselves. they were a door that opened to a whole new journey. I learned to pursue these opportunities with vigilance, to build upon them and to let them inspire new ideas for building an audience. if you’re not pushing your filmmaking forward in some manner every single day, then you’d better go out and hire a great publicist (and a team of interns) to do it for you. that, or turn in your indie credentials right now. haha!

I received a vast “DIY” education from Lance Weiler and Arin Crumley. I now understand how to build and sustain an audience and the importance of creating a framework for the filmmaker to interact and make himself or herself available to the people drawn to the work. I now know the value of transparency and the importance of giving myself permission to fail as I experiment with the newly emerging distribution models. I now know that I’m not alone in wanting to change the status quo by retaining ownership of my work and I know it will happen for us soon. It is only a matter of time, planning and effort.

Many of you are already fans of our wildly popular short film. This is a quick and easy way for you to help us make another.

JUST FOLLOW THIS LINK…

http://www.ourstage.com/banner/charity_bookmark/zakforsman

And again, thank you!

Zak Forsman