Matt Hanson, director of "A Swarm of Angels," a crowdsourced film

Two scripts under development in an open source film project

Elina Shatkin interviews Matt Hanson director of A Swarm of Angels

Photo courtesy of Future PublishingMatt Hanson is a noted British author, filmmaker and film futurist interested in expanding the boundaries of traditional filmmaking. His latest project is A Swarm of Angels, a crowdfunded, open source filmmaking venture that aims to create a £1 million movie with the help of 50,000 participants around the globe.

Anyone who wishes can join the "swarm of subscribers" for £25, and in exchange for their subscription, they will have input on the entire moviemaking process, from the development of two competing screenplays to final distribution. In fact, the movie that ultimately gets made will be given away for free to participants under a Creative Commons license so they can download, remix and create their own works from the media.

Here, Hanson discusses his concept of Cinema 2.0, the fallacy of the mass market approach, and his ambition to bring art back into the business of moviemaking.

Elina Shatkin: How and when did you conceive the idea for A Swarm of Angels?

Matt Hanson: I wanted to distill the ideas I'd been thinking and writing about. How could you really move an image forward into the digital age and make it feel natural? When I'd talk about these ideas to people, they would be like, “We're not seeing it.” I realized I needed to distill it into a simple idea that would capture people's imaginations, then use that as a Trojan Horse for other cool ideas and concepts.

Q: How do you define Cinema 2.0? Is it a new visual aesthetic, a new methodology for making movies, or both?

A: I use Cinema 2.0 as a tongue-in-cheek label, but it conveys the idea that this is an amalgam of digital-age filmmaking techniques coupled with the social power of the Web. This is a way to create media and large-scale free cultural works. It's also about pushing the aesthetics and innovation of filmmaking.

Q: How do you think this new production process will affect the aesthetics of cinema, if at all?

A: At the start of the process you're using digital video, which can be manipulated infinitely, so you're not as constrained by in-camera aesthetics. Digital technologies mean you don't have to create a film negative and grade it with all those expensive chemical processes. And the Internet [as a distribution channel] means that you don't have to spend all that money to get a wide release.

Q: Yes, but many of these advances in digital technology have been around for a decade, and they haven't really changed the kind of movies that are made. Do you think new technologies and production methods will change the kind of films (that) are made rather than just how they're made?

A: Absolutely. People want more distinctive and personalized content, and they want to have a more meaningful connection with it. Look at the popularity of YouTube. You have to sift through a lot of dirt to get to the diamonds, but within that you've got a huge section of activity where people are free-forming without being constrained by needing to be commercially successful or fitting into a particular genre.

In the traditional filmmaking process, you've got to make sure you make your money back by reaching as wide an audience as possible. If you reconfigure this process, you don't have to do that. So it's a way to create more distinctive media.

One of the paradoxes of the model that's evolving with A Swarm of Angels is that by giving away a certain amount of your power as a filmmaker and opening up decisions to the community, your community becomes your touchstone, your focus group. And all you have to focus on is appealing to your community.

I thought about it and decided that 50,000 people would be a manageable community. It's a very niche audience, but it's big enough that you can create decent-sized media with decent-sized budgets and get it directly to members.

Q: How have you gone about creating a community for A Swarm of Angels?

A: Rather than launching with a big bang and trying to get as many people as possible, we're using conversation in the blogosphere to target those people we think will be into the idea. As we grow our community through this channel and through "word of click," it will become more tangible and we can reach out to a broader array of people. Right now we're building up our community ethos and appealing to the right people.

I think it's an important change for filmmakers, acquiring these new skills and building a new relationship between filmmaker and fan. The audience is no longer the right word for the people you want to appeal to, because the new "audience" is much more active.

Q: In terms of creating a community you have advantages that most other people don't. What advice would you give to the kid from Tulsa, Oklahoma or Zimbabwe or wherever?

A: [Laughs.] I don't want to be negative, but I think they'd have much more of an uphill struggle than I've had. I've taken advantage of my semi-infamy to say look, we're going to push these boundaries.

If you're going to do it, I think you need to first build up a creative reputation in some way. I've seen a couple of projects on the Web, where people are trying to set up social networks around filmmaking. But they've got no filmmaking experience and no creative or even conceptual background. They just think this is a great idea or whatever. And that to me is replicating a lot of what you see in film now. You need to have a reason to do it. What you need to do first is find a creative focus. Then from that reputation you can start channeling a community.

Q: How have you reached out to contributors and attracted supporters?

A: One of the reasons for doing this is that I got really frustrated trying to innovate creatively and then going the traditional production route. For normal film production, you fall into the trap of having to package a project properly and hire the right director. A Swarm of Angels is about bypassing the gatekeepers and reaching out to a generation of people who are into the new architecture of participation.

Q: Why the £25 subscription fee, and what do the members of your swarm get for that?

A: The subscription fee works as a barrier to entry. I would have got thousands more people signed up for A Swarm of Angels if there had been no subscription. I've done that myself, signed up to a Web site because it's so easy to join, but there was no investment in terms of my attention or support.

What do members get? As we move forward, members will receive exclusive merchandise, and at the end of the production only members will get the DVD release. It's about creating a value-added ecosystem that gives members as much as possible for their subscription. We're able to do that because we're hitting people directly rather than going through middlemen and distributors.

On top of the tangible stuff, members can vote on decisions. The big vote is that they get to greenlight which of the two scripts goes into production. But if people want to get more involved than that, they have the opportunity. If they put the effort in and have the talent, they can move up the ranks of the community. And at a particular point they may join the professional crew for the production. We're opening up the generally closed system of Hollywood to be much more of a meritocracy.

For example, a guy who I had never met before, a French scriptwriter who's never had any credits, joined the swarm and gave such valuable input in the discussion forums about one of our scripts that he's now a task leader on that. It's a perfect opportunity for him to break into scriptwriting. And if that's the script chosen for production, he'll get paid for it as well.

There's a woman from New York who came to me very early on and said (that) this is such a unique process that it needs to be documented, and we should use our community to help do that. So we're making a crowdsourced documentary about the making of the movie and the community. She's the task leader on that project.

I've got a photographer from Osaka, Japan who's helping visualize the effects for (one of) the scripts, The Unfold. He's created the most amazing images, which we're going to use for the teaser poster. If that script goes into production, he'll probably become the set photographer.

Q: What percentage of your (current) 1,000 subscribers are very active in the production process of the movie?

A: Have you heard about the 1/10/89 percent split? It's this emerging rule of thumb in online communities that 1% of any kind of subscribed community will be active contributors. The next 10% are more like critics. They help you by giving you detailed feedback. Then the rest of the community is involved through much more low-level participation, which is still really valuable. They'll do things like tag things or vote. And with A Swarm of Angels, they'll help spread the media. This is crucial for us because we're using a hyper-distribution model to get all this stuff out.

Q: So, (only) about 1% of your subscribers are very active?

A: At the moment we have more, because these 1,000 people are the development community. Our active base is more like 1-3%, and our critics number 10-25%. But I think as the community expands the participation will go down to a more typical level. One percent of 50,000 people contributing in a core way to the production is a manageable number.

Q: Is there any other funding aside from the subscription fees that members pay to join?

A: No. It all comes from the subscriptions. We called it a million pound film, but if you do a breakdown, 50,000 people at £25 each works out to £1.25 million. But we've got to deal with things like taxes, developing the infrastructure of the community and creating the DVD.

We had a vote early on about what we would do if we generated profit from this production. Our community voted that any profit we generated would be rolled into the next production. Ultimately, I hope this becomes a self-sustaining production and entertainment community. We've already got a community of subscribers, so if we please them enough, hopefully they will sign up for the next production.

Q: What stage are you at in terms of the production?

A: We're still developing both scripts, The Unfold and Glitch, and we're not going to choose one over the other until we reach 25,000 subscribers. We're working on creating a finished draft of each script as well as visual materials for both of them.

Q: How are the scripts being collaboratively written?

A: I'm testing two different collaborative approaches. With The Unfold, I am writing the first draft but I am doing it with feedback from the swarm. To take an analogy from computer gaming, it's an on-rails approach. As I've been writing it, I've been releasing previews on forums and getting feedback from people. That feedback has been coloring how I've been developing the script. I wanted to get a first draft out and put it on a wiki, so people could start taking it apart and improving it.

With Glitch, I came up with a basic pitch for the story, which is more like an Amores Perros multi-story approach. I got feedback from people much earlier in the process, and I took that feedback and synthesized a number of different scenarios from it. Then we had a vote on which stories people wanted to go forward with, what they liked best. It's much more about putting something out there, getting feedback, synthesizing that, voting on it and repeating that process.

The reason I wanted to test those two approaches is because I learned previously that people find it much easier to offer opinions on content that's more fully formed. If there's less there, it's harder for people to plug into it. This whole process is a complete experiment. I wanted it to be deliberately extreme, because this is an opportunity to test out all these pioneering ideas.

Q: As most people who have experienced group decision-making can attest, it can be a great way to share ideas. But it can also degenerate into bitching and bullying. How is that process working with A Swarm of Angels?

A: Mostly it's been pretty good. Actually, I think the main problem I have is eliciting criticism. People are almost too respectful of my ideas and the process. They're so used to this idea of the creator and not having any input. Our process is not about picking something apart. It's about improving it and utilizing the wisdom of crowds to do that. Because it's such a new process, I think people have been a bit reticent.

Also, at the start of the community I was not that great at creating participation points. It's been a huge learning curve for me as the creative director of the project. But now I think we've got some really cool things in place that help elicit participation and feedback.

Some people are fired up about this process, because they don't have the time or the inclination to do it themselves, but they love to be part of it. So how can we make it easy for them to participate? Rather than requiring them to check in every day, we decided we'd have voting days. We'd group a bunch of votes together, so people could swarm in and go click, click, click and make several decisions.

Q: So you haven't experienced the vitriol that sometimes accompanies faceless Internet discussions?

A: Don't get me wrong. We still have criticism, but it's generally respectful and constructive. As the community scales up, that might change, but I don't think it will, because this is a closed, self-selecting community. I've seen a couple of social networks around making a film, and all you have to do to join is sign up. There's no subscription fee. I'm sure because of that you're going to get a much more disturbing cacophony of disparate voices that are much more disruptive.

We've convinced people to part with their hard-earned cash, so they don't want to fuck with the process once they're actually inside. They want to be constructive about it.

Q: I guess there'd be no point in ponying up £25 just to be an asshole.

A: [Laughs] That's a good point. I should use that as a tagline. "Pony up 25 quid, and don't be an asshole."

Q: Has it been at all hard subsuming your ego to the will of the collective?

A: Not so far, because as one of my community members said in a forum discussion when I asked, "Can I kind of go against what you're saying?" He went, "But you have complete veto over everything we do!"

Q: So if the swarm made some decision you hated you could say, "No, I'm not doing that"?

A: I think I wouldn't open everything out to a vote. It's quid pro quo here in terms of the process. As the
creator/director I am opening up this process more than one would ever think possible for somebody who wants to get involved on a casual basis. But on the other side of that, respect my vision and keep the process on track. You're buying into it, so help make it happen.

If you really want to make a mark on it, you have the opportunity to do that by contributing ideas. I try to respond to absolutely every piece of good feedback, so there's an ongoing dialogue.

On the other side, this could be the rebirth of auteur theory. A professional scriptwriter who joined told me, “I'd much rather work with people who are totally buying into what you're doing rather than having one or two producers who hold the purse strings and have the power to greenlight you totally at their whim.”

Q: Even the most hard-nosed of auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick relied on a dedicated team of collaborators. How is an open source movie project qualitatively different from a film made in a traditional way with a very collaborative cast and crew?

A: The whole relationship is different. This process is much more open. You're dealing with a community rather than these gatekeepers. In essence, you're turning cinema from what it has become, a business, back to what it was originally, an art form.

I consider A Swarm of Angels not a return on an investment but a return on entertainment. It's about making an artistically excellent and distinctive creation rather than fleecing as much money as we can from the wallets of consumers.

I just want to say that I'm not anti-capitalist at all. I actually did a business management degree. But I think this process of dis-intermediation, cutting out all the middlemen, means that you can actually create a post-capitalist cinema, just to be high-falluting about it.

Q: People who participate in the process, what kind of credit will they receive on the final film?

A: Everybody will get a credit but not a credit as a producer. I've seen things like The 1 Second Film, where people pay $10 and become a "producer." But they're not really a producer, are they? There's no meaning to it, if you pay $10 to get a producer credit. It's ridiculous.

I've been a producer myself, but I've been much more of a creative producer. I've really helped the filmmaker develop the script and move in a particular direction. I think this idea of the $10 producer demeans what a producer can actually be.

So no, not everyone in A Swarm of Angels will get a producer credit. But in the open-source tradition, like when Firefox had a spread in The New York Times listing of all the contributors who helped create the latest version of their browser, we'll be doing similar things to that. For example, we're going to release a special edition of our project trailer that credits everyone who's been part of the first 1,000 members of the development community. We will do things like that, which will be much more meaningful actually than a producer
credit.

Q: Tell me about the Creative Commons license. What will people be able to do and not do with the film once it's released?

A: They can download it, remix and distribute it as long as it's not for profit. In addition to that, some of the assets will be licensed under a Sampling Plus license. As much as possible of the raw footage will be usable under the Sampling Plus license, which means that veejays, remixers and filmmakers will be able to use it for their own productions. For example, if we get some overhead shots of Tokyo because we have the money to use a helicopter, we're going let people use that for free in their own commercial productions.

It'll be the same for the final film. If you want to use it as a veejay for a commercial performance in a club or whatever, you can do that. We're going to open it up as much as possible. The only reason it's under the non-commercial license is so that commercial entities can't take the film and exploit our goodwill by doing something commercial with it.

If you're using it as an artistic endeavor and you're trying to make a bit of money from that, that's not a problem. But if you're a big corporation, then you've got to pony up.

Q: What's your distribution strategy for the final film: theaters, DVDs, online? Any particular order?

A: I'm completely platform-promiscuous. I love the idea of a big screen. I love the idea of a small screen. I want day-and-date release on everything and a new type of distribution to get it out there to as many people as possible.

As a filmmaker in the digital age, you can't control where your film is going to end up. So don't control it, embrace it. To paraphrase Tim O'Reilly, I think there's so much content made nowadays that the number one threat to a new filmmaker isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

Q: Do you know yet what format you're going to shoot it on and what format or formats people will be able to download the finished movie in?

A: We're not sure yet. Formats change all the time. It's definitely going to be high definition. We're considering the Red camera, but we haven't even decided whether to shoot on normal high-def or 2K or 4K. We just want to make it as successful as possible, so there might be a version that goes out with standard broadcast quality stuff. If users want high definition footage, I think that will also be available, but that's not going to be the only thing. We'll make it as successful as we can using the best technology at the time and using peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent.

Q: Do you think the collaborative moviemaking style of A Swarm of Angels will ever catch on in the film world? Perhaps even be co-opted by Hollywood as a trend for big budget films?

A: I think Hollywood takes what it can and uses it for its own benefit. What I'm interested in is kick-starting a creative and business model for the viable production of large-scale free cultural works. That's a massive ambition, but I think it's achievable. If you've got tens of people following you, you're a crackpot. If you've got a hundred, you're quirky. But if you've got thousands, you're actually a movement. And soon we'll be thousands of people, so that makes it all viable.

I don't think this process is going to overthrow or overwrite Hollywood. And I don't want it to. I like a lot of Hollywood films. What I think it can do is revitalize art house filmmaking.

Q: How important to you is the quality of the final product versus creating a template for a new kind of participatory large-scale cultural experience?

A: I'm very into the process. It's important to me to engage in it and to help pioneer it, but ultimately it has to be about the end product as well. And that's what the community wants. They don't want something that's mediocre.

What I've been involved in before has always been striving to be artistically excellent and experimental in the best sense of the word. That's got to be the benchmark for A Swarm of Angels. Because if we do something in the name of experimentation that's shoddy and unprofessional and amateur, then it's not going to make a case for this kind of production. So this has to be great.

(Edited by Marla Crockett)

5/21/07