99% (The Occupy Wall Street Film)

There are now 75 filmmakers involved in the US 99% (The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film). According to the Kickstarter fundraising site, ”It started with a few filmmakers in NY, but within a couple weeks people were joining in Denver, Portland, LA, Boston, Seattle, Philly, DC, Kansas City, Miami, Pittsburgh, Austin, Dallas, Rhode Island, Nashville, Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, in short: it took off all over the country.  Skilled editors got onboard, PR people, producers, post production supervisors, a supervising editor signed on, post production services were donated by Metropolis Post, Duotone contributed library music, and everyone started pitching in what they could. As more and more people joined the project, people started helping each other with their shoots, with equipment and contacts.  This film had taken off; the experimental process was working!”

The filmmakers are hoping to raise $17,500, “It’s the amount we need to buy the hard-drive storage and editing space that will allow us to begin the massive process of sorting and editing. This will get us to the point that we can, at the very least, put together a promo reel to bring in additional funding.”

I plan to interview Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites, the filmmakers who started the project, in the New Year to find out more about how they are handling the editorial and logistical challenges of the project. Meanwhile, the fundraising campaign ends January 13th. To help reach the all-or-nothing target, Ewell and Aites are hosting an online screening of work-in-progress on January 8th. You can buy a ticket for $3.99 at the Constellation Online Movie Theater. Watch the trailer and find our more at Kickstarter and on the 99% site.

(Apologies subscribers who got notified of a draft of this post.)

Cowbird

“Cowbird is a simple tool for telling stories, and a public library of human experience.” Jonathan Harris’ latest project, just released, Cowbird is a gorgeous new platform for individual and collaborative storytelling. As Harris describes it on his site,

“Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web. We are building a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance.

Cowbird is also experimenting with a new form of participatory journalism, allowing people from all over the world to collaborate in documenting the overarching “sagas” that affect our lives today. Sagas are things like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, and the Occupy Wall Street movement — things that touch millions of lives and shape the human story. We believe the real story of a saga is the story of every single person touched by the saga. But it’s never been possible to tell that kind of story — until now.”

Harris is best known for We Feel Fine, “an almanac of human emotion“, created by sampling the world’s blogs every few minutes for the words “I feel fine” or “I am feeling”. The work, created with Sep Kamvar, made a stir when it was launched in 2005 and soon became an iconic piece. Still live, We Feel Fine still impresses for its innovation and for its realisation, bringing computer science, data visualisation and storytelling to bear on content that is unlocked by tapping into the common metadata structure of blogs.

While studying computer science at Princeton Harris noticed that, ”suddenly people en masse were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives; blog posts, photographs, thoughts, feelings opinions…so I started to write computer programmes that study very large sets of these online footprints.” The beautifully simple idea of sampling the blogosphere was one way Harris went about this, working with the human data in the snatches of self-expression being accrued moment by moment on social media platforms. I Want you to Want Me (2008) continued this line of inquiry, examining contemporary love and desire through the content that people post on dating sites. Since then Harris has explored the space where storytelling,human and machine meet in a number of fascinating projects including The Whale Hunt – a Nanook of the North for the digital age. You can explore them all on Harris’ site.

Cowbird enters a field which, partly inspired by Harris’ past work, is becoming busy.  Storify looks like a similar proposition but is about storytelling through aggregation rather than considered narratives by individuals. And Storify is a less alluring proposition. Cowbird is elegantly realised so that you want to explore (though I haven’t had time to yet). But I’m uncomfortable with the invitation based membership. It will no doubt guarantee a high quality of content, but it seems at odds with the project’s professed remit. A “small community” can no doubt tell some great stories. But can it be inclusive enough to build a “library” of “human experience”? I guess we’ll find out.

There’s an interview with Harris about Cowbird on Design Mind.

99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film

How to reflect Occupy Wall Street and the actions it’s inspiring across the US?  99 Percent: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film is the response of a group of  US documentary film directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers who are contributing time, skills and gear to document the events taking place in NYC and across America.

Ray Pride from Movie City News talked to some of them,“Audrey Ewell, a New York filmmaker and one of the founders of the project, says: “It felt like a media blackout.  I was glued to the Globalrevolution Livestream on the day the NYC police arrested hundreds of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, as others yelled ‘We’re not the criminals.’  And then the feed went out because whoever was filming ran out of batteries. And it wasn’t being shown on the news. We felt a need to gather footage like this from all over the country and craft a document of the big picture.”

Brooklyn-based filmmaker Michael Galinsky says:  “As a filmmaker and photographer I understand both the power of media and documentation.  I knew right away that something significant was taking place and I wanted to be a part of it.  I wanted to use the power of documentary to give the voiceless a voice.”

This isn’t the first time people with media skills have got together to create independent coverage of the kinds of resistance that get scant or negative attention from mainstream media. The UK Miners Strike Campaign tapes were organised in this way back in 1984/5, for instance. The Web doesn’t make these collaborations happen, but digital connectivity can help. The “99%” team want to be responsive, getting a film out quickly to show what is happening, as it is happening. They’re asking others to join them, and are using Kickstarter to gather production funding. You can keep posted via Facebook and Twitter.