Following that much talked-about Ridley Scott + Kevin MacDonald YouTube project, emerges Redd Inc: another crowd-sourcing film project. This one is a little more interesting, purely because it includes “strippers, murders, medical experiments gone awry”. Intriguing! If you’re an actor, director, musician and/or artist, the film wants you. All you have to do is go over to the Redd Inc website, join, submit and rate.
Easy peasy Japanesey!
At the time of posting, we have about 12 hours to go before the official kick-off of Ridley Scott and Kevin MacDonald’s YouTube Life in a Day project. The idea is simple: get thousands of people around the world to submit their Life in a Day via YouTube. The “compelling and distinctive” footage (shot in a mere 24 hours) will be put together, all montage-like, to form Life in a Day; set to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
Crowd-sourcing is nothing new. But crowd-sourcing for the big screen? That’s bound to set some conversations alight in media-land, where the nerds are always itching to be a part of something massive, new and exciting. My good self included. Will I be participating in this 24-hour madness? Hells yeah!
Pop-Up Magazine
It is always interesting to see creative folk redefining the boundaries of “traditional media” by creating innovative content across different platforms. Pop-up Magazine is one such example that has made me think about how I like to consume my media. Pop-Up Magazine is quite literally, a magazine brought to life. From the official website:
“Pop-Up Magazine is the world’s first live magazine, created for a stage, a screen, and a live audience. Nothing will arrive in your mailbox; no content will go online. An issue exists for one night, in one place.
Pop-Up showcases the country’s most interesting writers, documentary filmmakers, photographers, and radio producers, together, on stage, sharing short moments of unseen, unheard work. Books, films, journalism, photography, and radio documentaries in progress. Obsessions and digressions. Outtakes, arguments, and live interviews.
Each evening of Pop-Up unfolds like a magazine. Short reviews, dispatches, and provocations anchor the front, longer features follow in the back. Our theme is no theme. Pop-Up seeks to explore the varied world around us, through stories and ideas. Science, music, politics, art, business, food, literature, design, nature—all in a 75 minute show.”
It is interesting to note that here, the creators seem to have taken one step back in terms of technology. They have thrown aside all gadgetry and fancy applications, and gone back to basics: stage performance. Their content is struturally and stylistically magazine-like, however the form is completely out of the box. I find this incredibly refreshing, and I remind myself that creating something new, fresh and exciting doesn’t necessarily have to involve state-of-the-art technologies and gadgets.
48 Hour Magazine
“Welcome to 48 Hour Magazine, a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media’s old limits. As the name suggests, we’re going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days.”
I love the concept of this project. Creating a magazine from scratch in a mere 48 hours seems completely impossible at first, but looking at the state of new media technologies today, and the rate of which information can be transmitted beyond geographical and physical boundaries, I’m beginning to feel confident that this will be a success! This project sheds a whole new light on the idea of crowd-sourcing and content production. The website says: “Writers and artists from some of your favorite publications like Rolling Stone, Wired, Dwell, Gizmodo, GOOD, Lapham’s Quarterly, HiLoBrow, Fray, Paleofuture, and The Rumpus have already signed up”, giving me hope that the quality of content will not be compromised in spite of the tight deadline.
Submissions open 7th May.