photo credit: oooh.oooh

I’ve been in meetings with an awesome advertising agency that's interested in collaborative filmmaking projects and open source movies. I won’t give their name yet, because it’s still in the handshake phase, but I’m excited about the possibilities and wanted to update you on some of the things we’re talking about. We want to work together on launching a collaborative open source web series that could skyrocket into the mainstream. Each episode will be 3-5 minutes long, involve heavy collaboration with a who done it mixed in a reservoir dogs style setting, and span 100 episodes in the first year. We could start shooting next month that’s how fast I want to move on this idea. This would be the PERFECT project to use new video communication technology and have embeddable widgets etc. We discussed looking for a technology partner to join the team. I wrote a seperate blog post about that here. The episodes will be released furiously and we’ll be using all different writers, with pitches and ideas coming directly from the audience (the first few episodes will probably be written entirely by my existing team just to get things off the ground, with the ENTIRE rest of the season left open ended).

It’ll start with two full film crews (the one I used to make Jathia’s Wager which includes volunteers from all over the world, and the entire pro crew the ad agency has and hopefully grow to encompass MANY more people. The goal with Moviepals is to create original films using online collaboration, but also to act as a resource and source of inspiration for movie enthusiasts and aspiring filmmakers of all experience levels and backgrounds. This goal takes a lot of work and we’re doing it one step at a time. We also talked about bringing on a technology partner (which I have 2 meetings with potential parties this week) to create a virtual event type system with web 2.0 tools will allow “regular” people a much easier time to contribute. I would love it if members could track the main project timeline and focus on particular parts they’re interested in following and attending live collaboration events (like discussions on where the plot should go in the series would be one example). It should also have VERY simple ways to contribute that can be as easy as voting yes or no on a simple question to the audience. I’ll post more information on the events as they unfold. I will be doing this web series with or without their collaboration. It will of course be more difficult and take longer for me to launch without them, plus they were very enthusiastic, creative, unfraid of change and very intellgent. They would make a perfect partner for Moviepals.org.