Today, I received the following email from a young filmmaker in New York:
"I wanted to propose to you a new form of cinema I'd love to help you explore... The form of cinema I'm proposing is one where the director is more like Mike Leigh (thinking aloud with actors instead of writing alone with actors in his head), the actors are actually people with cameras (not filmmakers per se, but participants willing to use cameras/editing as needed), and rehearsals happen publicly online in a site that looks like a threaded message board but with video posts: for example, http://tinyurl.com/rsqmv.
As a filmmaker, you would get to think aloud with a small army of young people with cameras (so to speak) while you explore certain topics, subjects, and emotions. After a few weeks/months of this, you might find a few participants who would fit a certain film you'd like to make. You might simply have a final set of assignments/ideas that the participants would explore. You might set a deadline for when the project ends. Or maybe you choose some moments you hope to find in the process - and when you've found them, the project ends.
The hope would be that 1000s of videos exploring truth are created and 100s of young people are inspired having collaborated with you and each other in this new exploratory form. If you decided to create something linear out of this, we could then turn all that media back over to the community of participants for editing, you could edit it yourself, or we could do a mix of both.
One short-term way to start this project would be to get participants to shoot things relevant to I Am A Sex Addict... Another way would be for this to be a separate film/project - something that might work well while you're on the road. (We have it set up so that you can download all the new videos, and watch them while not connected to the web.) It would also be easy to turn the whole project into a DVD."
I replied by saying I thought it was a great idea, but that the videos should all be under a minute. He wrote back the following:
"It would be easy to post them to your blog/vlog. We should use medicinefilms for upload - http://www.medicinefilms.com. (You can sign up...) The site lets you upload, and then gives you HTML to post into whatever site."
So to start this off, I am putting out a call to anyone who is interested to send me a one minute video letter (which you can upload on medicinefilms.com) in which you can communicate anything you like about me, the film, the blog, or the idea. I will then post them on my blog or vlog. The only requirement is that they be honest in some way.
posted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:55 PM
