Crowdsourcing and Film Manipulation

This week I viewed my direct film manipulation which involved drawing, bleaching and scratching film stock to create interesting patterns of color and light during the film screening. It was a really interesting experience to create something that is so unique and unusual. Understanding how film can be manipulated both manually and digitally is incredibly important to a filmmaker because it helps us think beyond current perceived limitations of the media. Hollywood has given filmmakers a language of cinema that is rarely challenged. This viewpoint makes the story structure of a film carry more importance than any other cinematic element but this is only one way to view cinema. If a filmmaker wants to create revolutionary films and achieve critical acclaim then it is important to understand ways to interact with the film media beyond classical film setups and editing. Even if these direct film manipulations are rarely used, perhaps a horror film could be enhanced by purposely scratching a portion of the film. Or a character's insanity could be illustrated by an animation that is drawn onto the film stock by hand. These tricks and techniques can come in handy and can even be used in classic Hollywood avenues by a talented filmmaker to add some spice and zest to his or her films.

Now the class is investigating creative crowdsourcing to generate unique ways of symbolically representing the importance of the number four. Recently, the power of micro financing has generated a lot of attention through sites like Indigogo and Kickstarter. But the concept of crowd creativity is still new. This is probably because it is difficult to read through a ton of creative ideas that are drastically different from each other by nature. But when firm parameters are established, idea crowdsourcing is becoming a new art form that will probably grow in popularity as the process becomes more streamlined through trial and error. Fiver.com offers a type of crowdsourcing where you can pay five dollars to different artists and have them perform different micro-tasks that are simple and can be combined to create a larger project. The internet is helping almost any task or activity become collective if the user decides they want to have multiple perspectives. This is simpler with things like crowdsourcing design elements and choosing the best one, but things get more complicated when something larger (like a film) is created. Different skill levels, tones and styles can create a disjointed story, but the human experience is not always cohesive so this could actually represent the human experience with more authenticity.