Crowdsourced film interviews.

MOD Films makes re-mixable films and tools for film re-use and they turn it into a game

Morgwn Rimel interviews Michele Ledwidge from MOD Films

Michela Ledwidge founded MOD Films in 2004 with a NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) Inventions and Innovations award. Inspired by the practice of game modding, she envisaged a 'Sustainable Story System that would allow audiences to modify films through the use of Internet and video game technology.

All digital assets from the original Sanctuary production including production footage, sound effects, dialogue, storyboards, concept drawings and still photos, are being released alongside the commercial release into the Creative Commons for non-commercial distribution and re-use.

Morgwn Rimel: When did you begin Modfilms and what was your inspiration? What are the project's main objectives?

Michela Ledwidge: MOD Films was founded in 2004 as a spin-off company from my consultancy Thequality.com which has been doing media R&D since 1993. After a couple of real-time (live) film projects, Horses for Courses (2001) and Extreme T (2004), I started to research what was going on with re-mix culture world-wide and thought it might be a good idea to set up a dedicated story-telling unit.

There have been so many inspiring developments over the last decade but three stand out - a keynote speech Danny Hillis gave at the SIGGRAPH conference in LA in 2000. I was in the audience listening to this amazing inventor ( e.g. RAID, parallel processing, a bunch of stuff for Disney) talking about the accelerating technical progress, the Singularity, and how difficult it was to visualize concepts like this. He invited the audience to let him know if they had any ideas. I'd just been demo'ing a film in another session and the idea of a massively multi-lingual movie popped into my head - an intelligent narrative format that used every trick in the book to communicate. With all the new developments being explored for new media, all of a sudden it seemed crazy to have to limit your story to any one specific distribution format or platform. What if there was a way to produce a film in a way that better lent itself to future malleability. At the time I didn't quite realize what a Pandora's box this was going to be (the "prototype" is still under development after 3 years) but it was an exciting couple of weeks. Having the chance to talk the idea over afterwards with people like Danny was what got this whole thing started.

I'd been VJ-ing on and off in clubs for a number of years by this stage, so I was pretty familiar with what you could and couldn't do with real-time audio and visuals. It's been clear for some time how more and more control is going to be achievable so there are lots of live A/V groups which were and continue to be inspirational. MIDI-triggered visuals have come a long way in the last five years. The Light Surgeons, an early UK group, were actually the first to use the term "remixable films" that I'm aware of, although they were only interested in creating a remixable experience themselves, not allowing the audience to do so. Only last night I saw The Sancho Plan performing an amazing live cartoon with a posse of drummers triggering real-time animations.

Lastly, the explosive popularity of Counter Strike (a MODification of the 1998 video game Half-Life) was both an inspiration and an eye-opener. Valve Software pretty much pioneered the game MOD culture by being significantly less precious with their published game than people had previously. With a published version of CounterStrike now available for purchase, things have gone full circle - audience members are now part of the next phase of production. That in principle, is what we're trying to do with MOD FIlms - establish a framework by which a two-way relationship with the audience and story can be developed over time if the original work strikes any chords.

Q: How does Modfilms fit in to our discussion about crowdsourcing?

A: This two-way relationship with the story I mentioned is all about sourcing inspiration, participation and resources from the crowd. We've developing a virtual studio system that aims to provide a more sophisticated "youtube-like" experience that is useful for professional as well as amateur productions. With Sanctuary, the first production using the system, we want to explore a film MOD paradigm where the core material can be treated as a finished work but also as a library or construction kit depending on your interest. For this to work (and especially to get funding back in 2004 with this idea) the key has been developing a community of highly diverse participants and working out how this could all work. What we've learnt is that it is less about developing one monolithic community but rather, much like the Internet itself, creating a network of inter-related crowds that have different but complementary agendas.

Q: Projects like A Swarm of Angels, Stray Cinema and Open Source Cinema use the crowdsourcing model in relation to specific areas in a film's life cycle (development, funding and production). Where in the cycle does your project engage/ collaborate with crowds? How?

A: In terms of Sanctuary, the engagement started right at the beginning but to maintain some element of surprise, which I think it essential for a film to work, all the collaborative systems are invite-only and limited to people working on the project at this stage. I've been maintaining a (private) director's blog since 1997. A core group then used the blog to hone our original funding application and re-develop the script. Sanctuary is the origin story of a larger superhero tale that was originally developed as an interactive feature film property for another company. Once we hit the concept art phase, our message boards system started to be used in earnest to recruit artists for the project. We've got around 120 people signed up to Team Sanctuary - most of whom have actively participated in the project or will do so prior to release.

We ended up working with 16 different concept artists, all whose work will eventually be released as part of the asset library, which is pretty good going for a short film. We found though that while certain crowds were able to engage easily with the new media systems set up for the production ( e.g. forums, wiki, blogging tools, RSS aggregator) the majority of "real film people" couldn't get their heads around it and found the web framework intimidating. Concept artists and developers took to the forums like ducks to water. They were hardly touched during actual production though.

Software developers working on the project were all hired via a process that invited them to jump in and start contributing ideas and questions via the Sanctuary wiki. Because Team Sanctuary is scattered around the globe, it was imperative that any developers were totally up to speed on teleworking and collaborative tools. In a sense you could think of the whole film as a kind of wiki and Team Sanctuary as the folks preparing to release it. A lot of the processes for hosting and engaging with a large ( i.e. public) group of subscribers should hopefully benefit from the long private gestation the system has had.

The Sanctuary project has had two key engagements with wider crowds and public collaborations to-date. Firstly, our original call-out that has quietly enabled the company to build a wonderful network of collaborators and interested parties world-wide providing advice and various forms of support. Secondly, when MEAA attempted to organize an industry boycott of the project (because of the precedent-setting signings of professional actors to CC licenses), we were only able to proceed because MEAA's public statements triggered a backlash from our wider community some of which has been recorded in forums and blogs around the world like Slashdot).

We're gearing up for the third, which is to start turning some of the expressions of interest in "film MOD'ing" into actual projects to re-use Sanctuary material. In-house there is a game and an A/V instrument under development but I'm particularly interested in making sure that everyone with an idea around this has the opportunity to get hold of the material pre-release and start mucking about.

To everyone else, we're not really seen to be engaging with crowds because we haven't released anything yet or opened up the virtual studio to the public... yet. In short the MOD Films virtual studio system engages with crowds at every stage of the cycle but what makes this project a little different is that our aim is first and foremost to make the films. There has been a whole lot of thought put into how we open up the studio to wider crowds for entertainment purposes but as many other projects like Swarm of Angels, satisfying the needs and aspirations of the wider community is not always seamless with the process of just making the stories themselves. There is something exciting but also scary about releasing your art in this way. What happens when the crowd is wrong? How do you deal with the mob mentality?

We're looking forward to opening up everything (and to the keen onlooker there are plenty of soft-release assets already out in the wild) but by re-focusing on term Studio I hope we're making it clear when and how we engage with people. It's an exciting time, lots of noise online as always and at the moment, we've got our head down in VFX post. Crowdsourcing is essential to how we see our product developing but our key responsibility is in developing a story system that works for viewers and creators.

Q: One you establish a working story system and begin release films, what role will crowds/audiences play (vs audiences of traditional films) in the watching of your films?

A: The RIG (Reactive Interface Framework) re-mixable film format under development is intended to function a little like Valve Software's Steam web service where updates to titles can be uploaded and downloaded. modfilms.net is a working prototype (minus graphic design) of the mechanism by which audience members will be able to vote for the most popular MODs which then can be seamlessly downloaded into bought copies of the film via the Internet - think unlimited DVD extras. The crowd will determine how and to what extent re-mixable titles evolve in a commercial sense.

The MOD Films virtual studio, behind the scenes as far as a traditional audience is concerned, will provide access to the film almost as a wiki. My (director's) cut of Sanctuary is essentially version 1.0. It will be left to the audience and crowd to check out material and check in changes and updates over time. Tracking all this behavior and making the user experience entertaining is one of our challenges. Post production and game developer types will know what to do with the raw material, for the majority of the audience though, we need to work closely with technology and service partners to ensure that access and interactivity is as friendly as possible.

Personally, I intend to "perform" the film in venues in similar fashion to how live soundtracks are occaisonally performed for cinema classics. I think once people see live what the medium can do then they will want to have a go themselves, hopefully spurring on the market for more interactive story titles.

Q: What impact do you think your project has had/ will have on social media?

A: I think our little effort has had some impact in terms of making certain people question how they produce media and others how they absorb media. Certainly in Australia, we've broken the ice on CC licensing in professional media circles and that should hopefully make it easier for other productions. That said, Internet time is faster than dog years. Back in 2004 it took me around two days to describe the project and now "user generated content" is practically a mainstream concept.

The typical response I get to the project is "mmm, that's different" or "that's really clever...but how exactly does it work?" Ultimately the proof of the pudding will be how the final packaging works with people who've haven't been subjected to my arms waving explanations or endless tech demos. If the final results look and feel like good films then I think there will be a lasting impact. We've barely begun though.

As undeniably exciting as all this is, at the same time a UK High Court judge admitted last week, in a major "terrorist" case, that he didn't actually know what a Web site is. We have to learn to walk in this space before we can run. The lasting impact of this project could be more empowering social media and a resurgence in personal story telling but only if we succeed in packaging this up for mainstream consumption. A lot of the interactive story-telling pioneer projects of the 80s and 90s have vanished into the ether. Once our approach is (inevitably) co-opted by mainstream media things will accelerate and but there's always a chance that the direction will be strikingly different.

Q: Where would you like to see Modfilms in the future?

A: As a well-respected company working with a talented global network on great flicks - films and beyond.

Q: What other ways do you think this idea of crowdsourcing will/ could be used?

A: Film funding and film completion processes. How many films never see the light of day because they run out of steam? Once film re-use is more mainstream, crowds are going to love resurrecting old bombs and disasters.