There is a new genre under the sun: the collective movie. Contrasting with traditional moviemaking that expresses the vision of a single filmmaker, collective moviemaking brings together images shot by a number of filmmakers. While the finished film may reflect the personality of the editor-director, the visual style has the diversity and richness of a patchwork quilt.

A current example, inspired by Ridley Scott’s “Life in a Day,”  is “One Day in Spain,” produced by RTVE , Spain’s public radio and TV service. Spaniards, at home or traveling,  were invited to shoot videos on a single day—October 24, 2015. Each video had to deal with one of four questions: “What do you love?” “What do you believe in?” “What do you fear?” “What is your dream?”  Thousands of clips–most shot with phones and tablets–were submitted. The completed film, edited by renowned Catalan director Isabel Coixtex, will be shown at the San Sebastián Film Festival in September 2016. Here is the trailer.

If you speak Spanish, you can see  a 5-minute making-of film featuring Coitex here.

You don’t need to be a major producer to turn out a collective film. This is the sort of project that can be used to document a family event, such as a birthday party, a wedding, or a reunion. The beauty of mobile moviemaking is that just about everyone attending will be carrying a high def camera. All you need to do is invite people to shoot interesting moments—holding the camera in the horizontal (wide) position—and then send them to you via Dropbox or a similar system.

If you’re more ambitious, you can do a collective moviemaking project with people who live far from each other. An example would be a collective movie shot by relatives in their own homes on Christmas morning. Another idea would be to collect video comments by family members for a movie about a beloved grandparent

The same technique can be used to make concert videos, travelogues, commercials, and even found-footage narrative films.

Whatever your collective moviemaking project, to simplify the editing task, you might restrict submissions to clips running no more than 30 or 60 seconds.

If your collective moviemaking project pleases you, we hope you’ll share it with us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A hundred years from now, historians may call our time the Age of Cooperation. We see it with crowdfunding.

In the mid-twentieth century, film theorists celebrated the auteur:an  individual filmmaker whose films expressed a unique vision. While that model still exists, we

captured their unique visions