‘Crowd-sourced’ film brings animation to the masses

Valerie | 20 Jul 2009, 16:33


Still taken from the Live Music trailer

The power of community is, some argue, often grossly underestimated, with collaborative trends on the Internet from Web 2.0 to Wikipedia seen as merely social or informative in nature. 

However – a new project that engages amateur animators to contribute to the making of a five-minute animated film using the Wikipedia model – illustrates that community works on the Web are powerful ideas in action that transcend geographic boundaries and political restraints.

The brainchild of Hollywood veteran Yair Landau, the former Sony Pictures digital chief, Mass Animation, a web site that enlists animators from around the world contributing shots, and Facebook users voting on their favourites was launched late last year and has since morphed into ‘Live Music’, a completed short based on Romeo and Juliet that Sony Pictures Entertainment will be bringing to the multiplex masses in November.  More than 50,000 people from 101 countries signed up for the group experiment that is being billed as the largest global collaboration in animation.

As an earlier New York Times article explains, advances in technology and soaring box office receipts for family films has seen a broad range of new animation films entering the cinema, including Imagi Studios’ “Astro Boy” lined up for an October release,  “Up,” from Pixar, and “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” by 20th Century Fox.  In 2008, four of the top 10 movies at the US box office were computer-animated films; the marketplace is clearly hungry for more content, animated in particular, that is done in a faster, cheaper way.

Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony’s entertainment division said:

“Social networks can operate like automated talent scouts, helping the cream rise more quickly to the top, and that’s what happened with ‘Live Music. While creativity has been pretty evenly distributed in society, it hasn’t always been easy to tap into.”

The project hasn’t been well received by everybody however –some professional animators are unhappy with the idea, denouncing Live Music as a “cheapskate” film using an “exploitative” method.

Speaking to the Guardian, Landau said the resulting short film is “a clearly less professional product than you would get from animators who have been in the industry for years. But it’s a start and an indication of what can be done.“

The finished film, which saw winning animators hailing from 17 countries including Kazakhstan and Colombia and featuring eleven female animators in the final line up – in what is a male-dominated industry – signals the possibilities that can come from democratizing the creative process: Facebook has since indicated that it would be keen to work with Mass Animation on more “ambitious ideas” in the future.