The Future of Film: Collaborative Storytelling

I 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 after Connected 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 and 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 citizens and people who want to make something together.  

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock