Below, is a BREITBART article with WIKIPEDIA founder, Jimmy Wales. Some interesting points made, but the assertion that no one is doing it yet, is wrong, wrong, wrong. LOST ZOMBIES comes to mind. As does STAR WRECK and the WRECK A MOVIE project, and Matt Hanson’s A SWARM OF ANGELS. The emergence of interdependent filmmaking is underway, but what this article shows is a lack of global penetration on the scale of Wikipedia or YouTube.

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.”

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PlaceVine today announced the conclusion of its successful beta and the general availability of The Brand Integration Service, a web-based information service connecting marketers to product placement, sponsorship, and branded entertainment opportunities in film, tv, and new media.

I believe we are on the brink of a new indie filmmaking movement. And i don’t mean the emergence of a new sub-genre. Currently filmmakers are focused on the monetary value of their films. And selling it to a distributor as a monetary reward. but say you were to aggregate your film using bit torrent, giving it away for free as Jamie King did with Steal This Movie. his film has been downloaded 6 million times. if he were able to track who and where those people were, he would have something very valuable – a list he could take to advertisers and brands and say, this is my audience. this is the demographic i can offer, lets negotiate and strategize.

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?

I FUCKING HATE YOU will be available for a limited time as a FREE SCREENING on YouTube.com in conjunction with the From Here To Awesome / OurStage.com promotion. If you dig our little short, please sign-up for a free account and OurStage.com will donate $4 to us, and you’ll receive 30 FREE mp3 downloads.

Click to Watch I FUCKING HATE YOU on YouTube.com.

Just follow any of the OurStage links in this post or at the YouTube link and we will get the referral. It’s not necessary to fill in any referral info, it’s all automated. THANKS!!!

To my mind, the biggest problem (as a filmmaker and cinephlie) is that the system is set up in such a way that audiences don’t have TRUE choices for content. The system favors the safe and familiar and “what’s worked before”. I wonder how many cutting edge, iconoclastic filmmakers have been passed over in recent decades because some suit couldn’t reduce their work to “it’s like RoboCop meets Pretty Woman”? I’d like to see this flipped on its head so that audiences have a portal through which they can access a vast array of content on demand and pull it toward them, rather than having distributors push selected content at them. This portal would navigate though a variety of methods including searches, intelligent recommendations, keyword tagging and metadata, and good old word of mouth through a social network that would also allow fans to interact and communicate with filmmakers thru live and recorded video as well as text-based discussion. For the suits reading this, “its like DirecTV meets Amazon VOD meets iTunes Store meets Facebook meets Google meets Video iChat meets Coppola’s Little Fat Girl all packaged into a 60″ HD television with webcam, harddrive, and broadband built-in”.

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.