The future of film is collaborative storytelling, says Tiffany Shlain, filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards.

Tiffany Shlain: I just published a manifesto that I called The Cloud Filmmaking Manifesto and in it I laid out what I think the future of film is, which is collaborative storytelling.  

So, I've just started this new film series called Let it Ripple: Mobile Phones for Global Change, and we rewrote the Declaration of Independence as a declaration of interdependence, and we posted it on the internet and we invited people to send videos and art work around the film.  We got entries from all over the world and we edited it together into this four-minute film . . . Moby did the music . . . posted it on the internet, YouTube featured it on their homepage . . . And this amazing thing started happening where people started translating it, volunteer translating it.  It's now in 65 languages.  Now we're making kind of free customized versions for nonprofits.  We've already made 80 free ones.

So I cannot tell you as a filmmaker how exciting this is to me.  I mean, the fact that I can collaborate with people from all over the world because of the cloud and we can work on movies together is so exciting.  So I'm calling it cloud filmmaking, and it really is collaborating with artists and just citizens and people who want to make something together.  It's about people participating and putting in their . . . part of their soul into this bigger creative endeavor.  We’re making 20 films this way over the next 4 or 5 years.  We're working on one called Brain Power right now, and we asked artists to send us images from all over the world about the brain and videos and we're cutting it together, and it just feels like I'm able to kind of edit together the human spirit.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd