Hollywood Directors Crowdsource Inspiration
Hollywood directors Tim Burton (Corpse Bride), Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind), Ridley Scott (Gladiator), and Judd Apatow (Bridesmaids) have been turning to Twitter and YouTube to crowdsource inspiration for their projects.
Judd Apatow used jokes sent by his Twitter followers to add humor to his speech at the Producers Guild Awards. Twitter was also used in the #Burtonstory, Tim Burton’s storytelling experiment which revolved around the character Stainboy. The project used the Cadavre Exquis, or Exquisite Cadaver, technique in collectively telling the story. Burton received 88,967 tweets from 2,141 users who submitted their own dialogue from November 22 to December 6 last year.
Directors Ridley Scott and Ron Howard turned to YouTube users for their own collaborative film projects. Scott crowdsourced and produced the largest user generated feature film entitled “Life in a Day”, which was directed by Kevin Macdonald and used footage from a pool of more than 80,000 videos submitted by YouTube users about their life on July 24, 2010. The National Geographic Channel will release the movie in theaters on July 24th, 2011, exactly one year after the events depicted in the movie.
Meanwhile, Director Ron Howard used YouTube for his Project Imagin8ion, a user generated photo contest in partnership with Canon to inspire his next short film. Interested photographers were encouraged to submit their photo based on eight categories: setting, time, character, mood, relationship, goal, obstacle and the unknown.
What other ways would you like to see Hollywood use crowdsourcing? Let us know on our forums.