Here we are.

Crowdsourcing is the big thing, these days. In the realm a filmmaking, and I'm sure many other fields as well, crowdsourcing largely means crowdfunding. And crowdfunding is essentially allowing many people (friends, relatives, countrymen)to donate modest but manageable sums your film. Think Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And this is a challenging, yet fantastic way for films to get made that otherwise might not have opportunities for funding.

But even more challenging than crowdfunding, I would argue, is crowdsourcing talent (creative crowdsourcing). Not only are you asking for the crowd's talent but you are putting faith in the crowd's colletive creative ability. And you are putting faith in the fact that, even with the most talented artists and filmmakers, you will be able to assemble all these creative contributions in such a way that, your film has a unified vision. There are some really cool examples of creative crowdsourcing out there. For example, the Johnny Cash Project or Star Wars Uncut.



Perhaps we're still just at the beginning stages of this mode of filmmaking. Maybe we're at the virtual-world-internet equivalent of the Lumiere Bros setting up their camera and allowing for everyday scenes to be captured on film.



In other words, we may understand the nuts and bolts of crowdsourcing. We may know how to put together a crowdsourced project. But we haven't yet discovered a cinematic language for creative crowdsourcing, yet. Just as early filmmakers had to realize that a film had editing capabilities that went beyond the conventional boundaries of the stage play, crowdsourcing must also have possibilities beyond conventional filmmaking. If we don't explore those possibilities, crowdsourcing will just be an interesting trend that surfaced for a while, but then lost its novelty. After all, cinema wouldn't be the giant force that it is today, had we not discovered editing. If we don't grow the potential of creative crowdsourcing as a concept rather than a technique (in which it's all just about how cool it is to get 1000 people to contribute to a film) we are missing out on a means for expressing our shifting reality. After all, as we get more immersed in a virtual world, we are leaving our traditional sense of space and time. We look at our news feed on Facebook, where we have a view on the outside world and the reality that unfolds is very different than the reality in which early cinema developed. This new, virtual reality, is devoid of space and time as well as linearity.

How does creative crowdsourcing serve that shift?