Can the INDIETALK community come together?

A

Absolution_Films

The Indietalk online community is one of the best I know and like any good community when they work together they can create something special.

Even over the past year there have been indie talk collaborations on certain members personal projects.

But can the whole indietalk community come together to write, direct an produce one film in which every indietalk member that wants to be involved has their part in the project.

It would be a film that's been made worldwide by many filmmakers for a common art.

The great thing about this community is everyone has their purpose and skill.

Is this something we can do by the end of 2013? Or is it an inconcievable dream?
 
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I don’t know about you, DesperadoMan, but I can’t afford to travel to Ohio so
I can work as a PA for free on a movie. You ready to travel to Florida and not
direct the script you didn't even vote for?

The way I see it, the person whose script is chosen will be thrilled, the director
will be thrilled but the nine writers who didn't get chosen might lose a little
interest. I suspect those nine will not be thrilled about traveling out of state
to work on the movie.

Of course if you all vote for my script and then all travel to Los Angeles to work
on that movie....
 
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DesperadoMan17 said:
How about each state gets a crew together and films a scene or two then we put it all together? Idk im throwing some ideas out there
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I like that one. Kind of what I suggested. Each team puts a crew together
and makes a segment of a film that is part of a whole. And then those
segments are put together.
 
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We're all directors here, not PAs . . . we're not going to yield much on creativity, SO, ideally we could have each person creating their own a 45-second clip that would work as part a larger film project, even if assemble-edited together at random.

Of course, we'd have find a theme or topic that would work for this.
 
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There has been some amazing advancement in organizational technology, I don't mean software or tools, but the techniques used in organization. The old "top down" approach of project management doesn't work for large scale multinational product development very well. The new "agile" method does. Agile methods are very small autonomous units working towards common goals with FREQUENT integration's. "Deliverable's", or work items, are delivered DAILY, all all the work is integrated as soon as possible, on an aggressive schedule.

Its common for several team to work for 2 weeks semi autonomously, the teams spend the third week integrating what they have been doing separately for the last two weeks and showing the work to the "customer" This allows for rapid development as the feature \ feedback cycle is reduced from months to only weeks..

One of the interesting fall outs from this is that things that matter to the "group" get done, things that nobody cares about much.. dont.. unimportant stuff just falls out the side. Also, this means at the most any team loses only two weeks of work when major changes are required..

In the old waterfall method, people would work on projects for months, until near completing and then show the customer the beta version only to find they had it all wrong and the customer hates it! lol


Just throwing that out there..
 
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For What It's Worth:

I recently finished working on a film which was a collaboration between 10+ units. It just got completed and is about to start running in festivals and perhaps a direct to dvd release in Europe. It's called Last Statement and deals with the actual last words of death row inmates.

What made this project and collaboration work, imo, is the structure of the script and story and the the way the different units were organized.

The main producers, director and writer were based in Germany and got in contact with other directors and producers through networking. One key aspect was that director and producers track record of actually completing films when committing to them.

The script was structured in a way where there was a main segment running throughout the film and then the 'last statements' of death row inmates were were divided into individual sub-segments which could be filmed autonomously by the other producers and directors.

This way, if a single segment director failed to deliver, the film would be unaffected and a replacement would be found. Out of all the segment directors, one actually did fail to deliver and was replaced. Apparently, it barely felt like a hiccup and things went right on going.

In addition, a forum was set up online where everyone could interact, update and collaborate. At the same time, personal emails were sent all the time from the main project director to all the segment heads, always checking the status and making sure things were moving along.

Once everyone has finished filming, the footage was edited, graded and scored back at home base by the main producers.



Btw, FlickerPictures was among my small cast and crew of 8. Hopefully I can share more details about it soon when I get receive some promotional material from them like a teaser, posters etc.
 
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I think it is highly doable. As everyone is saying, we need structure, so someone needs to take the absolute lead, and then have a few heads in charge of certain aspects of the film, and then have crews for each aspect.
Sort of like a business management model (Top Management, Middle Management, First-Line Management, Employees)

I would be down for this regardless of whether my ideas get used or not just out of the curiosity of the final result. Not to mention, I can do multiple things, writing, music, editing, voice work. I wouldn't want to do any of the actually filming as that would be too difficult for me at the moment, and I'd rather do things that don't involve anyone else in person. But collaborating on parts that I can basically do from my desk would be great.
 
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If you split the movie into different independent units all over the world (which makes it interesting), how would you deal with the characters? At least the main actor should be present physically.
 
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Desperado, since we're both in Ohio, you and I (and any other ohioans involved) have the potential to be in scenes together. I'm sure there's a LOT of New Yorkers on here.


My vote is for the space pilots idea though.
 
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wheatgrinder said:
There has been some amazing advancement in organizational technology, I don't mean software or tools, but the techniques used in organization. The old "top down" approach of project management doesn't work for large scale multinational product development very well. The new "agile" method does. Agile methods are very small autonomous units working towards common goals with FREQUENT integration's. "Deliverable's", or work items, are delivered DAILY, all all the work is integrated as soon as possible, on an aggressive schedule.

Its common for several team to work for 2 weeks semi autonomously, the teams spend the third week integrating what they have been doing separately for the last two weeks and showing the work to the "customer" This allows for rapid development as the feature \ feedback cycle is reduced from months to only weeks..

One of the interesting fall outs from this is that things that matter to the "group" get done, things that nobody cares about much.. dont.. unimportant stuff just falls out the side. Also, this means at the most any team loses only two weeks of work when major changes are required..

In the old waterfall method, people would work on projects for months, until near completing and then show the customer the beta version only to find they had it all wrong and the customer hates it! lol


Just throwing that out there..
Click to expand...

Digging where this conversation is going.

I would say that Agile can be a good model, but almost necessitates better leaders - or at least better decision makers. In that case, better includes some level of authority. I'll add context by saying I've been on some bad scrums.



I think if people are going to pursue this, then there should be a pilot / proof of concept. Throw out any convouluted ideas. Throw out any artistic vision. Build and test the process, then apply it to the concept.

Pick a simple story structure that could be done in a distributed way and do it. Setting the genre in something that hides the cheese / camp in a genre conventions (feature not a bug) to smooth the edges.


So I'll throw out a suggested pilot framework -

Total Length: 5 Minutes
Genre: 50s Sci-Fi / Low-Budget
Minimum number of locations: 5 (read that as 5 min contributors - enough to test, not enough to break)

What are 5 story ideas that fit in the above? I'll provide one:

1: A news desk that is chronicling an alien invasion / 1st contact. Central set is the news room, the other sets are on scene reporters / video.

Who has the next idea?

Again, let's not have your baby. Let's prep the delivery room.
 
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Miken said:
1: A news desk that is chronicling an alien invasion / 1st contact. Central set is the news room, the other sets are on scene reporters / video.
Click to expand...


This is the only way I can see this working as anything other than an interesting experiment. You'd need a way to bring together a bunch of different segments coherently. Maybe something Lynchian, maybe a collection of segments..

How else do you explain away the fact that your protagonist has not only changed gender, but physical appearance, age, size etc 5 times in the past 20 minutes?

How does an international collective collaborate in a way that allows autonomous production, without a single Director at the helm bringing together the overall cast, story etc.

And then, how does the post process work? You get all the editors to edit 5 minutes each..? How then does the movie itself pace? Does it end up as a shemozzle? Do we split the job of editing up into manageable 2 minute sections that the xxx editors can each havea go at, but then split the entire audio post process into 2 large chunks so the two audio guys have a large job ahead of them, for no pay? Or do we split that up as well, giving a bunch of peolpe small segments? If so, how is any sort of continuity in the edit process established? Again with the grade.

Just from a production perspective; you could have three different location shoots, one shooting main action, the others shooting ECUs and inserts, but how do you keep lighting continuity, actor continuity, sound continuity unless you have overall key HODs governing each aspect..?

And how do we ensure that each part is delivered on time? If one part is not delivered on time, then what do we do? Wait, or re-shoot somewhere else?

I'd be interested in a way this could work, and bring together an overall watchable film, but I fear that the most likely outcome is a production that might be completely unwatchable.
 
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jax_rox said:
This is the only way I can see this working as anything other than an interesting experiment. You'd need a way to bring together a bunch of different segments coherently. Maybe something Lynchian, maybe a collection of segments..

How else do you explain away the fact that your protagonist has not only changed gender, but physical appearance, age, size etc 5 times in the past 20 minutes?

How does an international collective collaborate in a way that allows autonomous production, without a single Director at the helm bringing together the overall cast, story etc.

And then, how does the post process work? You get all the editors to edit 5 minutes each..? How then does the movie itself pace? Does it end up as a shemozzle? Do we split the job of editing up into manageable 2 minute sections that the xxx editors can each havea go at, but then split the entire audio post process into 2 large chunks so the two audio guys have a large job ahead of them, for no pay? Or do we split that up as well, giving a bunch of peolpe small segments? If so, how is any sort of continuity in the edit process established? Again with the grade.

Just from a production perspective; you could have three different location shoots, one shooting main action, the others shooting ECUs and inserts, but how do you keep lighting continuity, actor continuity, sound continuity unless you have overall key HODs governing each aspect..?

And how do we ensure that each part is delivered on time? If one part is not delivered on time, then what do we do? Wait, or re-shoot somewhere else?

I'd be interested in a way this could work, and bring together an overall watchable film, but I fear that the most likely outcome is a production that might be completely unwatchable.
Click to expand...


All of the above = pilot.

I would imagine if you crowd-sourced pre & pro, why wouldn't you do the same with post? Lots of ways that could shake out. Nearly infinite. You could decide to have everyone shoot a complete edited piece. Or you could do a collaborative edit, or everyone could take it and do their own. Or assign roles to take care of whatever.

Why not pick an idea, try it, learn from it, fix it?

You need a modular design around a theme. The less structure on theme leads to less coherence. Why does the protagonist have to be the same? Could you do different time periods in each section - childhood, adulthood, coffin? Could you take the sync webseries idea and apply it to different people, i.e. Eclipse phase. I think you enter into a non-standard story structure, but it doesn't have to be all that complicated.

I would assume that most of the people participating in this process are not seriously expecting a financial return at this point. I would imagine that most people here do not get paid to work on the items they work on, but maybe that is incorrect.

To be clear, my suggestion would be the goal length for the entire project to be 5 minutes. Not 5 minutes per location.


I'll actually pull a recent example of this that could be an interesting proof point. The nfl did a series of commercials with people in different places, that actually kind of worked:

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-videos/0ap2000000069011/Little-Guy
 
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Sci-fi potential lends itself to warping through dimensions... allowing characters to shift body (and camera angles/colorization/sound/location/etc). The story is the key however!!! Also for the director..Skype video. 'Nuff said?? Not perfect, but doable. And please, everyone, stop thinking about money all the time. I know it's difficult, but advertising "costs" something, occasionally it's not money, that gets you more noticed (=money).
 
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A lotta people on here have DSLR's, so if it's shot on that (24p) I'm assuming, the entire thing could have the same quality.

I'd say everyone sends their footage to a single editor (experienced of course), so as not to screw anything up.
 
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