Culture: Art, Music and Film

Crowdsourced Music – Interview, Sudha Krishna co-founder of RapSpace TV

Marie: Interviewer

S: Sudha Krishna

M: Can you introduce yourself.

S: My name is Sudha Krishna and I’m the director of productions for RapSpace dot TV

M: What does your company do?

S: Well, we do a lot of things, our company is actually called the Nimble company and our main project is RapSpace and what RapSpace is it’s a global online hangout for the hip hop community, you know, think myspace meets youtube for the hip hop generation and that will give you a sense of what RapSpace is and we want to be a voice for all the great hip hop that’s out there, now there is commercial hip hop which is fine and people listen to it and I enjoy it. But we also think there’s a huge and we know there is a huge untapped ..ahhh…talent pool out there that is being creative but needs a platform for their creativity and we want RapSpace to be that platform.

M: So how are you attracting artists to your space?

S: Well the first thing you have to do is build the product, which is what we did recently we built the website we have it launched, the next stage as you said is finding the artist and getting the word out and um.. and we do that through online marketing, through viral means, through various online social networking tools and we have and this is the most important thing, we give the artist the ability to promote themselves, your community is your biggest proponent. And so we have all these sort of social networking tools that any artist would want in order to showcase themselves, for example, you can record a performance on our site and take that video from our site and put it onto your Myspace page, put it onto your own blog on to your own website. So we give people the tools to showcase themselves and put where ever they want on the web.

M: What are some of the responses from the artists and the contributors on the website?

S: So far, it’s been really, really cool. A - we have people from all over the world and B -there’s so much amazing talent out there that’s not being heard. It’s a real privilege to give people the opportunity to be heard and um.. it’s all types, all genres, you know we got Gang Starr , we’ve got Dirty Sauv, we’ve got Nerdcore, we’ve got female MC’s doing their thing, we’ve got all kinds of stuff, so it’s a real good mix of content.

M: Why RapSpace?

S: Well, I’m ahhh… I call myself a first generation hip hop kid, I’m certainly not a kid anymore but I certainly still really love hip hop because you know when I grew up, I was a kid in Scarborough, in Toronto and my first sort of experience with real sort of powerful musical moment was the message by Grandmaster Flash, Furious Five, you know… and when I heard the lines “don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge and all that sort of stuff this is something that grabbed me and then as I matured and grew older so did the musical form that is hip hop. It became really interesting in the 90’s, and I think now it’s at a stage where there is a lot of great hip hop but it’s not being heard, because face it, it’s now 30 years old the genre, you know, it’s comfortable with itself and I think it needs a little bit of a an injection of different perspective, different voices and we just hope, you know, in our humble sort of way that RapSpace can be one of those voices.

M: Now, I’ve checked out RapSpace and some of the material is quite shocking, not so much hip hop but talks about the message of hip hop, what discussions are going on?

S: We want to create the platform, we’re not preachers but we want to engage in a healthy debate about the music the way it’s being expressed what’s being said and so what we do, it’s what we do, it’s what ’m interested in, I’m interested in all kinds of debate, so I may blog something, you know, Don Emis and his nappy headed hoe comment and see what engagement that is on the site and people will respond and we’ll have a debate and dialogue and I think that is a healthy thing and you have all sorts of different perspectives of course, but it’s important to have that dialogue or have the opportunity to have that dialogue so people can be part of RapSpace without being a just being an MC, cause it’s not just about enabling creativity for performers, hip hop is a culture it embraces a lot of things, hip hop is the urban culture so when we’re talk about RapSpace we’re not just talking about rap we’re talking about the space in which this exists and that is our contemporary popular culture and that is a huge part of our contemporary popular culture. So we have blogs, we have news, we have forums, people have their own profile page so they can engage in that dialogue and that debate about what it means today to being interested in hip hop.

M: So this all fits into the new idea of crowdsourcing?

S: Sure, yeah, it does… it depends..ahh. I guess there’s different perspectives on crowdsourcing ..ahh. this is definitely falls within that family, sort of speak and our philosophical approach is definitely in line with the notions of crowdsourcing.

M: So what kind of artists do you find are involved?

S: Most of them are unsigned ahh.. but what’s really interesting they come to the site they put their stuff up, other users, fans, Mc’s, artists, producers, comment, respond and what we’re witnessing now are collaborations. So we have a hip hop artist from the United States collaborating with a cat out of England, out of the UK, one the guy from the US is Al Boog and the guy in the UK is Zeus and they just posted something where they collaborated, they found each other, ok, I like this guy’s vibe, lets see what we can do in terms of working together in terms of a creative flow and they put it out there and people are loving it on the site and more and more artists are starting to do that, so we’re seeing this evolution in the site, something that we hoped would happen but we didn’t want to push anything you let the community the crowd in their infinite wisdom guide things for you and you just nurture that.

M: Is this part of your value?

S: Yeah, like you know, when a social network is created one of the things you have to sort of have to recognize as the creator is once you create something it is no longer your own any artist knows that, know I’m not saying what we’re doing is art or anything like that but once an artists paints a painting they really can’t claim ownership really over that painting anymore because the interpretation the spectator or the viewer has of that painting becomes their own and it’s the same things as a social network accept its constant and dynamic. When you create a social network what you witness is the users make it their own they claim ownership because they’re contributing content so they feel they have a very vital stake and it’s up to us as the people who are sort of the mentors behind the site or the creators behind the site to respect that and to honor it and cherish it.

M: Is this where the music-making crowdsourcing aspect comes in where the artists are collaborating?

S: Yeah, where the artists are collaborating were the artists are working together commenting, suggesting, you know, we have lyricists on the site so there is a whole bunch of lyrics so some one else can grab those lyrics and rhyme them over a beat they created or a beat that someone else created so the sort of combinations of collaboration that you can have are sort of limitless.

M: What do you think motivates your contributors?

S: Love of music. What motivates our contributors is love of the culture and the music and that’s what is really compelling. Beyond that a sizeable amount want to likely make money, you know have a living out of the thing they love to do, right that’s a good thing, you know. And we want to help them along that way too. It’s not just about being able to publish your content, it’s not just about being about able to promote your content but it’s also about being able to profit from your content. And by that what’ll we’ll be doing once we get a bit more money and add more features to the site, umm, we’re going to enter into revenue sharing agreements with our users, if we make money you make money as a creator, so, that requires a certain build in terms of a feature, like you know, on the web platform, so we’re working on that now and we want to have that rolled out. We’re not making money now so there’s not so much money to share we’re making enough to maybe pay for some of our marketing, you know, we’re still a young company and we’re still growing and so we’re going to be introducing the revenue sharing models hopefully pretty soon.

M: So you’re hoping that it’s more like a co-op?

S: Umm, that’s a good question, I’m not sure if it’s a co-op in that sense, it depends I don’t know what the cooperative business model looks like to tell you the truth but what I do know is we’re committed to respecting the creations of our users and recognizing that it’s their content creation and if we’re going to make some money off of it so should they.

M: Who are you finding are the most prominent artists on your website?

S: Umm, if you go to the website you definitely have to check out Al Boog, Zeus, Star Mind, oh man if I missed anyone sorry, but we have a lot of members who are really good.

M: and Canadian?

S: Some of those I mentioned are Canadian. It’s interesting because we didn’t consciously set out to go after a Canadian market and I think that’s a mistake online. Because content and culture is global and local at the same time and so what we want to do is we’re proud to be who we are and we think its great we’re doing this from Canada but at the same time when you create a platform that anyone can create to from all around the world, you have to also ponder that. We’re proud of who we are but we’re not going to say we are truly just a Canadian site we want to be a global site and that’s what we’re becoming.

M: So if you have all these artists working together internationally who retains the rights to the music?

S: The rights to the music is retained by the artist but what that means is when you come to the site, means if you’re going to put stuff on our site we can use it online the content that you put on our site we can use. But you can use if for whatever you want they’re basically non-exclusive arrangements, so you can use your stuff wherever you want but if you’re going to put it on our site and we’re hosting the bandwidth and incurring all those costs you know then it’s like hey, we got to help promote the site so we may take your song and put it on Youtube or something and say check it out, right.

M: So to get back into crowdsourcing what’s new about crowdsourcing?

S: Ahh that’s a good question, I’m going to have to think about that. What’s new about crowdsourcing, ahhh, I don’t know, I’m going to have to get back to you. Ummm, it depends, what’s old about crowdsourcing, you know what I mean like when you say.. Can you amplify the question a little bit, can you explain it a little more.

M: Well we’ve got music and we’ve got ways to exercise music, use it, distribute it, so what’s so new about it?

S: So, all those things you just described have started to occur in the last few years, so what we’re seeing is a massive cultural shift in terms of how content is created, how content is distributed, how content is marketed, the entire eco-system for the creation of content, cultural commercial what have you is being revolutionized through things like crowdsourcing, through these various tools that you see online and through these new technologies that are emerging they are enabling people to have both control of their content and distribute their content but there are a lot of challenges as well because when you have such shifts such fundamental disruptions, when you have such fundamental disruptions, it creates both opportunity and a challenge, the opportunities we talked about you have more control you have all those sorts of things, the challenge is how do you actually make a living out of it, how does an individual artist, how does a small company how do these big companies because we see all the music labels scared to death. They’re laying off people they’re online distribution models, they don’t know what to do is it itunes, 99cents a download is it renting by monthly subscription, people don’t want to pay for music anymore, what do we do, what do we do. So those are emerging challenges, those are clearly emerging challenges that need to be addressed. Anyone that says they have the answers are full of it because no one has the answers right now. There are a lot of ideas on how to approach it but anyone says I can predict in the future and says this is what you have to do to make it viable as a business model, no, I don’t think you can, I think what you can do is say, what do I love to do, how do I find a way of in some way being compensated for what I love to do. That is what is the individual artist should say, should try and answer for themselves, ok if that means touring and that is my main money then everything else should support my live shows. So my CD sales which are non-existent because no one is buying CD’s anymore aren’t that important and so the cost of pressing a CD and all that sort of stuff can be off-loaded to an online service so it becomes an on-demand so for example, we’ll be creating a RapSpace store, ahh, with Cafepress, and Cafépress is an online store ,where they, create the t-shirt for you, create the CD for you, create whatever merchandise for you. They charge you a base rate and then you can add your margin on top of that, right? So that’s one solution for us because we can do all those things and that’s what record companies used to do so we want to offer those types of services to our user. So it’s the notion that what are we good at, let’s focus on that, and all the other stuff we have to augment in different ways. The greatest thing is the cost is reducing, so before in the old days with the music industry they would put a lot of money into a single artist in terms of merchandise, in terms of music videos and if that artist didn’t have a hit right a way, they’re toast. And that doesn’t respect the music that doesn’t do any of those sorts of stuff that should be done to encourage creativity and musical expression. But now you look at the social network sites there is so much more music and people are finding it and that’s a good thing.

M: Okay then being the brainchild and riding the wave before the tide comes in with RapSpace being new, where do you think crowdsourcing is going, what’s next?

S: I’m loathed to predict exactly where crowdsourcing is headed because I just, people who say they have the crystal ball I just don’t believe them, having said that umm, technology is going to drive a lot of this, like where’s technology heading, we know where technology is heading, faster bandwidth, more an more people are having access to bandwidth so the ubiquity of bandwidth is ahh, something that will enable more and more types of crowdsourcing, different types of engagement. So technology will make it more feasible, the cost of storage the cost of transmission of data is decreasing, decreasing, and decreasing and you see it increasing in terms of its availability through different types of devices, and now its mobile devices, right. So now we’re going to see it reconfigured in that way, it just won’t be a social network or anything like that, it’s going to be.. how do I put it I’m not making any sense right now.. umm..

M: No you are, what do you think it will look like?

S: What will it look like, it will be mobile, it will be fast, it will be everywhere that is what crowdsourcing will look like in the future.

M: Have we met its true potential?

S: Oh no, we haven’t met the true potential of crowdsourcing, we are at the beginning of something we are not at the end. We are just at the beginning of these types of relationships and networks. When you actually look at Myspace in terms of its technology in how it’s built it’s kind of clunky and kind of ugly and you see the newer social networks that are on board now they are far more elegant and far more beautiful. So technology and people’s ease of use with technology is just going to enable more and varied aspects of crowdsourcing. Like think of the difference between someone who is 40 someone is 30 someone is 20 and someone who is 10 years old, in terms of their relationship to technology. And it’s profound, right? I grew up where fax machines were introduced, CD’s were introduced, the cell phone was introduced, the computer became a mass market device, so I learned technology, I did not assume technology. A whole new generation, a generation they call the Millennials, or generation Y, they assume technology this is essentially the generation born post 1978, and so their set of assumptions, their notions of privacy, their notions of what it means to have a friend is not just a friend necessarily a physical being that you go to school with but a friend can exist around the world that you will never meet and that has profound implications for things like crowdsourcing

M: So do you think there is wisdom in crowds?

S: I think there is both wisdom and …what’s the opposite of wisdom.. I don’t know whatever the opposite of wisdom is there’s definitely that too in crowds.. you know.. for sure. .yeah naivety, chaos, disorder, ignorance. A crowd can be equally ignorant as it can be wise. So that’s both in the real world, in terms of the offline world or the online world or however you want to characterize it, crowds have the capacity for ignorance as well for wisdom and you witness that online everyday.

M: What have you been most impressed with? (in terms of this changing movement)

S: One of the things I‘ve been most impressed with its capacity for political organization for very specific causes, that is remarkable. The most recent example would be Barack Bama raising, what was it, 25 million dollars or something like that and all the donations were under a certain amount of money and Howard Dean did that as well. So that tells me there is a hunger and yearning among people for political engagement but the mainstream media and the mainstream forms of involvement aren’t addressing that hunger. Whereas where you see how crowdsourcing addresses it, it does, it gives people an avenue, a channel for that expression.

M: What surprised you the most? Is there a story here that you could share?

S: ahhh.. you know in terms of RapSpace one of the things that surprised me was how it became a place not just for battle, like when people talk about hip hop they think about the hip hop battle and we certainly have that on our site. But what really surprised me is how quickly it became a place for collaboration cause it is a community and you always have that doubt if you build it will they come, right? And we built a community but we’re saying does hip hop want a community where people are kind of supportive and collaborative as apposed to competitive and battling all the time which is what we think is the history of hip hop but hip hop has another history and that history is about collaboration, your DJ, your MC, your B-boys or B-girls, right your graffiti artist, your beat-boxer. They all collaborated in different ways in order to create our culture. So it just wasn’t about the battle. And when we created RapSpace we wanted to have that sensibility and what surprised me is that it worked. On one level, I hoped it would work and I thought okay we have a proper plan but will it? You don’t until you create it and it worked, thank god.

M: Can you share a story

S: There is an EP that is coming out a song collection that is coming out this summer, I saw a press release about it and it’s a prominent hip hop artist NAZ whose most recent CD is called Hip Hop is dead and his next effort is going to be remixing reworking, taking a fresh interpretation of Miles Davis tunes, and we were really excited about it when we saw it because it is a perfect example of what RapSpace is. In terms of a cultural mindset, we love the old, we respect the new and we see this sort of convergence between jazz and hip hop. They’re both urban forms of expression and to have that sort of classical urban form of expression jazz, mixing with hip hop is something we really want to be a part of. This is the type of content, creative expression that has a home on RapSpace.

Interview with Brett Gaylor

Opensourcecinema.org and Basement Tapes

By: Alec Mathewson – documentary filmmaker/video artist

About Open Source

There is so much excitement about it that I think that there are things people might take for granted about it that are not necessarily true like that if you put out this call that people are actually going to come out and do all this stuff… I think it’s a lot more complicated than that

We had people cover stuff in San Fransisco so when we couldn’t be in two places at once it was pretty easy to find someone with a camera to go shoot and who could do it and the quality is pretty good.

I think as far as documentary films go it is particularily relevant because there is this element of getting at the … you are always struggling to make the perspective as close as it can be to a person’s real experience and so the best way to do it for the person do it themselves - so that self documenting thing is quite cool.

Girl Talk

The example with Girl Talk (featured mash-up artist in Basement Tapes) has been his fans. I am saying want to really capture what a Girl Talk show is but all I can really capture in truth or what anybody else can capture really is their own experience from being at this show. But it is much cooler when I am saying I can get photos, and I can get videos, and I can get sounds and I can get testimonials from all his fans basically that have their cameras and that is the thing for me that has really taken off. And in the way that I think it is really going to be open source is that it will be a collective experience that you are able to present and not just a 1 first-person thing

I think that this is an example of an evolution in documentary in general. You know it used to be that a documentary used to be a narrated kind of fact based thing. If you look at old NFB films they were like the “voice of god” narration and then technology allowed it so that you could actually film an event unfolding when the cameras got small enough that a two person film crew could do it. Then that really influenced the form of documentary where you could get cinema verite kind of things. And then after that when video became an accessible technology and people began filming in places where a big camera couldn’t go and you saw the rise of amateur video. And this is sort of the next logical extension in that the audience creates part of the film.

About the role of the director/auteur/editor

Its how you set up the project. If you follow the example of open source software, its not everything goes. A person is still following the process. A human being still has to evaluate if something is good or if it’s bad. Or a human being has to say “ well I have to reject this change cause it doesn’t follow the end goal”. So somebody still has to keep an eye on the prize… the benevolent dictator kind of approach.

I think the most successful projects are the ones with some structure so you are saying “I need a particular thing” And with my project I have been asking for two things

I have been asking people to just simply remix footage or submit me a photo or video around a specific event and the difference between them is pretty stark. People are very willing to contribute towards a defined goal. And it‘s also like an attention thing… you know its like how much time are you willing to give to a project and how easy is it… it’s a different order of magnitude to say download all this stuff, re-mix it in your own way, and re-upload it than just “oh I can just upload a photo”. So you have to give those guidelines. That’s where you come in as an auteur is to lay the parameters and then after you get all the material, you’re editing. And that’s when the decision making happens.

And then that establishes the degree to how open the project really is. But the way that I have always looked at this is that the film that I make Basement Tapes - is going to be my version of this but as the process goes on I am almost more excited to see what happens after my version. Is the technology going to allow people to re-redit my film dynamically. I would like to see it go in that direction. Or will there be other films made that are completely different but using material that I provide.

Its almost that the film really has to evolve so that we don’t think of the film project just as one enclosed piece but rather that it’s the whole project and all the different spin offs it creates so its kind of evolving in that way.

AM: So you will make your film, it will play in theaters and then it will be available for people to re-invent as they want download and mash-up off your website opensourcecinema.org

BG: absolutely ya

AM: Is it ok for people to re-edit and load it up on their own websites

BG: sure ya… that’s part of the deal with the Creative Commons license. You have to be willing to accept that reality. I think for a lot of people find that pretty scary. They feel it will detract from the work they make and that it will lessen their impact. But I think it’s the opposite because the web basically works on a community of reputation. People will always kind of know that I put out my film first and they’ll know I have done this act of giving it away so all of the footage will still have that association with the core material (film) which I think will drive people back there (opensourcecinema.org) and generate more interest in the distribution of my film when they are seeing that not only did it create this one really good film that I made but it also created all these other great films as well. Which will hopefully encourage more people to participate and it will also encourage more people to watch my film.

AM: what is open source cinema – what would qualify something as being open source

BG: Its definitely something that is open for interpretation. Open source for me implies that the audience is some how implicated in how the thing turns out. They can have a hand in its creation in some form. But also that people are able to see the component parts that made the thing. That is how open source software works: you can see how it was made, A but B you can also change it. And again the seeing how it is made is pretty important to documentary films because we all know that a lot of stuff is taken out of context right. So… you know if I have an interview with somebody and they wonder hey… “is that what the guy really meant by this”. You know, I am hoping that can go on my website and see the whole interview if they want. And what that’s doing is its saying that because I believe in the truth so much that I am putting it all out there and I am making my bias completely known. My point of view is totally out there. Which has gotten me in all sorts of trouble even already. You know… you are not going to get that interview with the MPAA because any time that they google your name its like “oh this guy hates us”. So you are open in your intention and you are open in how you are putting it together and people can change it if they want.

AM: Describe Basement Tapes and OpensourceCinema and how they work together.

BG: My approach has been that I am involving the audience in every stage of the films process maybe with the exception to the film’s development. But the writing, I have put the entire script up as a Wiki so anybody can change the script as it is evolving right now.

In the shooting anybody can contribute their own footage to the film as well under the guidelines I have given them or they can just suggest things as well. In the editing they can download all the footage and remix it and re-upload it. And in the distribution in the license I am choosing to release the film under they’re free to distribute that using peer to peer networks. So my strategy has been to make attempts to include the audience in all the phases. Like I said before, I think the most successful element in this will probably ultimately be in the user generated content aspect of it.

I mean I keep sending out these calls for involvement. And I think the next step that I am going to do is… I’m finding that the Wiki is maybe not the ideal way for people to interact at this point. I’ve got the whole script up there… but its one thing for people to edit a Wikipedia entry on Shakespeare and its another thing for them to take another artists work and change it. And I think people have a certain level of discomfort in changing somebody’s artistic work. I don’t know what that is but I found it.

So what I am going to do instead is I am basically going to narrate the film and the script as I see it and I am going to ask people to send me areas where they think that they can fill wholes in that narration.

A digestable example would be; I want to have a section of the film where I describe the birth of the internet because it is pretty central to this whole downloading phenomenon that happened there was this kind of culture of freedom that came from that. So basically, I want to narrate how I see it. You know “it was started in this year… and these are the players… and this is what happened.” So that then they can find the images and put them along to my narration and they can find good interviews and start streaming that stuff out and then sending it back to me. Or they can say… “you know you got that point wrong it was actually this guy who invented it here’s a link to him. Its almost like Assignment Zero is doing saying that “you know we have all this research that needs to be done what would happen if we let the crowd do it?”

Just giving people the wide open call like, “Hey… remix this film!”… the reaction is “I have no idea what you mean by that… give me more guidelines.” So that is what I am finding. The narrower your request is the more easy it is. And it comes from that whole blogging phenomenon. You know the easiest way to keep interacting with peoples’ bloggs is to leave a comment. So the closest you can come to that level of participation the better. “Is this correct, yes or know?” 4 out of 5 say “yes” so I am going to take that course of action. That kind of thing.

AM: How do you disseminate your project in this huge sea of internet?

BG: It’s pretty interesting to watch how the internet works. It’s harder now than it was maybe 3 years ago. It’s very noisy… so you basically have to make a lot of noise. My approach was to go on Youtube for a solid week and find anybody who was doing similar stuff to this and just invite them.. invite them… invite them.. invite them. Ok now Myspace… do the same thing and Facebook and all that kind of stuff. But you have to be a real person doing that. Cause some sites do this thing called astroturfing where they just put in hundreds of people having these fake conversations between one another. But again when you are being pretty open people are pick up on that kind of shit pretty quick. If people know that you are genuine and that you are trying to do something and it comes from personality it’s a bit easier. But you basically have to be in as many places as you can and just spreading your content. I have my site but I post stuff on Youtube I post stuff on Myspace.

I just partnered with this site called I-Spot which allows you to do actual editing online. You’re just trying to generate as much interest as you can.

AM: Tell me more about I-Spot?

BG: That’s going to be interesting to see how that pans out. Basically I am trying these contests right now I am offering $250 to the person who makes the best Girltalk video. And this is like complete complete amateurs doing this and most of its just shit right like they just don’t know what they are doing. But your hoping for this diamond in the rough.

About Wikkipedia.

\BG: It was pretty crazy. There was this Wiki camp that they had in Montreal about a week ago and it was people who make Wikis for a living. People who are trying to take Wikipedia approach and they apply it to things like Travel or like “how to” guides or cooking. There is a whole industry coming from this stuff. I was talking to people and they were doing pretty well and have a lot of users… so how many people are contributing to your site… 10-15. The basic rule of thumb is that a high level of participation would be considered 1 out of 100 users. Which was an eye opener as it blue much of this stuff out of the water. You know Wikipedia… how many millions of people use Wikipedia? Somebody told me that Wikipedia’s core group of people that actually make it is like 1200 people. And that’s the king daddy/high watermark. Nobody’s going to touch Wikipedia ever and its 1200 people. So you are looking for that 1 percent person.

As for me I am just 1 guy and I am doing a whole bunch of stuff so I am basically looking for 5 people 10 people and that is what your core is going to be. So then your logic starts to think…. Ok what should I be doing here should I be appealing to as wide an audience as possible or should I be just centering on these 5 people and then say that it really doesn’t matter if it is technically difficult because there might be 5 people that are willing to do this and that I shouldn’t be kind of spoon feeding them because what they really want is a challenge and something that they can really dig into. It’s sort of a balancing act in making it really accessible and something that people can really sink their teeth into. But that blew me away the whole 1 percent thing. It also kinda scared me cause did it mean that I have to get 10 000 people before there is one that is actually going to do anything.

It’s all about experimenting. You can say “click on this tab and edit this film” but it doesn’t mean anybody is going to do it. The best stuff is when people send photos. So if I have a big chunk of the film that is made from other people’s photos well then mission accomplished. If I didn’t get people to completely re-engineer the ending of the film well then maybe then there was nobody that was going to do that. You can’t twist the internet to your will.

AM: How many people do you have right now contributing

BG: We have 350 users (people who are registered) 1 month after starting up and visitors we have about 1000 a day. People contributing… people who have remixed that is a handful. 5 people right now who have gone through the effort of downloading and remixing and re-uploading. There are about 5 people who have done that. But again, photos and videos, that’s crazy… a lot of people. We’re getting people sending remixes of nothing to do with what I have proposed but are great non-the-less. In that way, that has really taken it in new directions. You can have all these guidelines but then you get one crazy mash-up video and you think that’s the guy I should hire to do my animation. So it also works that way, that’s open source to. It wouldn’t have happened had I not laid it all on the line and asked people to start sending stuff. Some of the most rewarding stuff for me has been someone’s crazy song or just weird animations of Britney Spears getting cunnalingus from Tom Cruise or whatever. Its like this hilarious stuff… this is funny. Who knows, who knows what is going to happen?

AM: How do you sell and work a project like Basement Tapes and OpenSourceCinema.org with traditional funding agencies and broadcasters?

BG: As you know I have been developing this project for a long time so like 4 years ago when I was describing this project people were like I don’t understand what you are you mean at all. But then all of a sudden Youtube was a huge hit and we were saying we are going to have a whole bunch of shit from Youtube… BING! They get it! So its going to look a little bit like Youtube its gong to feel a little bit like this ProAm kind of thing. “Cool I get that”… “Hey has anybody ever done that before?” – no. … “Awesome!”

So in that sense it has worked in my advantage. But with the broadcasters, they want to know that you are going to come up with a film after tbe end of it. So on that end the the deeper open source element hasn’t come up in our conversations that much cause I pitch it like a regular film. When it does comes up in a conversation on “how will you do that” I tell them I am just going to have people send me their photos and their videos and use it as content. That’s not that weird to them… the idea that some guy in India is sending me content from a GirlTalk show. The difference is that I am asking for it on a massive scale and through the internet. \

I have a pretty non traditional array of funders. On one hand I have the private broadcasters while on the other I have people like the NFB and the Canada Council who have a sort of cultural mandate. And the way I have approached it to them is that I am moving people from consumers to the creators and that I am trying to use this project to enable that switch and I think people appreciate that.

It has all worked in my favor. The only place where it hasn’t is when I am so open that I am not able to get the interviews with the bad guys.

AM: You can use found footage of the bad guys interviews no?

BG: Of course. Like in any film we have a budget for clearing that material. But we also feel we have a solid case for fair use. Because we are specifically being critical of the media and we are commenting on it, if those agencies are unwilling to clear that for us we are just going to go ahead and use that because we feel that we have the right. And given the subject we have to push that boundary. We kind of have to walk the walk a little bit which is partially why we wanted to make the film Open Source because of the subject matter. I wouldn’t take this approach for every film. In this particular film it makes sense and in this day and age if I didn’t I don’t know how good I would feel about it.

AM: Technially speaking – the way the film is playing out is that it will be what it will be based on the kind of footage you get. If you get a pixilated video of a concert and that is the only copy you get – then that is part of the aesthetic of the film So you have to move with the development of technology as well as content.

BG: It would be ridiculous for me to put a period at the end of this sentence. If I had been more together and finished this film in 2005 how goofy would I feel in 2007 with that statement? Like “Oh Youtube wasn’t out yet and there was no such thing as user generated content.” It dates itself within 3 months.

About the Projects Success.

BG: It’s cool to see how things have kind of caught to what my vision of it was years ago. And for that I am happy that I am sort of now in that position that when this film is finished it is going to make sense and its going to feel like that is how the film should be. It is serendipity. I am glad I recognized early on that I wanted to make it Open Source because that kind of influenced how I let the film played out. If I hadn’t and I wasn’t paying attention to how the played out it would end up being a far weaker film but it is going to be really exciting and it is going to have that feel of where we are at right now. Which is basically everything is changing but it changing in a far more democratic way than where it was 4 years ago and how people thought the internet was going to evolve.

When the Internet first came out it was a huge free for all. The only people using it were artists, academics, and freaks. But then money came along and used it as tool to sell things and it went that way for several years until blogging started coming back that we realized that maybe this is really a citizens medium. I think it has gotten to the point where that will never be taken away. There will always be those closed in spaces out there but ultimately it is the people’s voice. And that’s cool. And I am glad that that is going to be included in the film. You know I think that’s what its going to look like.. its going to have video bloggs and pixeling things, and uploaded concerts videos and peoples mash-ups. I don’t miss the interview with Alanis Morissette.

AM: How far do you think the open source movement will go in how the general public views & interacts with films?

BG: Eventually we won’t call it that. Just like we don’t call watching television “receiving a broadcast”. We do this already. We take it for granted that we are playing an Itunes Playlist at a party but Jesus… but thirty years ago that was revolutionary that you could take all your hits and then you could play them all in a row.. holy moly. I think eventually that will become part of our experience that we are going to line up the media how we want to watch it but to a certain extend we are going to be commenting on it. And the way that I think that will happen is that traditional broadcast will change. In particular documentary and informational programming, if you watch something and you don’t like it you can comment and say “I don’t like this and I would have done it like this and you can find that on my page over here.” and you are going to send that back. There will be much more of a two way experience and I think there will be a lot of people creating in that way. That will be part of your production process that you are shooting and are putting it in a pool and then as the director you are overseeing how people react to that. You are seeing how people interact with your ideas. The way that people will be react to your creations in not through simply watching them, they will show it back to you.

Scratch Video has its roots in 1960’s and the 1970’s, when a number of video synthesizers were developed often as home electronics projects by backyard inventors, with a few notable that were commercially developed and sold for use in the developing nightclub scene. In the 1980s the development of relatively cheap transistor and integrated circuit technology allowed for the creation of digital video effects hardware for individual VJ’s and nightclub owners.

By the 1990s, advancements in computing had brought video processing to the desktop computer. The 90s also saw the development of a number of digital video mixers. Although these mixers were designed for home video editing and low budget TV production, they were quickly adopted by VJ’s as the core component of their performance setups. Initially, video mixers were used to mix pre-prepared video material from VHS players and live camera sources, and later to add the new computer software outputs into their mix. Frequently using video mixers, VJ’s select, blend, cross fade, scratch and cut video into a live, moving composition. Some of the VJ’s concentrate only on visuals, while others also work with sound as well. For example, some VJ’s use a sound source to create a visual, or use a visual source to create a sound.

In recent years, there has been increasing access to the art form and VJing’s popularity with artists and the public at large has allowed for more VJ centered events to be organized in both art spaces and in clubs. Electronic musical instrument makers are producing specialty equipment for VJing. The increasing power and affordability of home computers has allowed for VJ programs to be produced. Today's VJ’s have a wide choice of off the shelf hardware and software, covering every aspect of visual performance, including video sample playback, real-time video effects, scratchable DVD players and 3D visual generation, making the art form more accessible. Notable artists and collectives who have worked in different ways from the introduction of Scratch Video till present include Coldcut, EBN, GNN, Addictive TV, TV Sherriff, NomIg, Kid Koala, Piratetv and Mike Relm.

There has also been some interesting crossover between VJ culture and the open source movement. Some VJ’s use and help develop open source software, and re-use each others files or samples, sometimes radically reshaping them through their process of production. When one adds the opening of the floodgates for mash-up videos all over the web from youtube to opensourcecinema.org, we are seeing a time when the editor is become key to this overall process. As scratch video styles and techniques are becoming more recognized within television, commercials and music videos; the avenues for which they are being mashed up online will only grow in the coming years.

If crowdsourcing is about tapping the wisdom of everyday people, is it possible to have crowdsource groupies? That may be what's happening with T-shirt design site Threadless.com, which has spun off Threadies.org, a Web site dedicated to and maintained by Threadless groupies. I need someone to interview some of the folks at Threadies and see what the deal is.