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Crowdsourced Vine Short Film by You and Airbnb
A film can be as simple as coming up with a concept, brainstorming the shot list, shooting, and editing. That’s what Vine, the app that lets you produce six-second video loops, and Airbnb, the site that lets you rent people’s apartments, are counting on for their short film Hollywood & Vines.
Airbnb is tasking Vine users with creating the content that will comprise its crowdsourced short, which will premiere on the Sundance Channel on September 12th. From August 22nd to 28th, Airbnb disseminated the shot lists hourly between 8am and 5pm via Twitter. Each tweet issued a creative prompt for users to create a six-second video and tweet it back to Airbnb. For example, shot 19 reads: “Exterior shot: A single paper airplane flies out of a window, then more planes follow.” The concept is to make a film about “travel, adventure, and finding your place in the world.”
Crowdsourced movies are becoming more and more popular. My first memory of crowdsourced filmmaking was Star Wars Uncut, where users were able to claim roughly 16-second-long scenes from Star Wars: A New Hope and create their own version of it. The film was then edited together and released online, taking fan fiction to a new level by fully utilizing the potential of the Internet (The Empire Strikes Back is in the works). Most recently, National Geographic teamed up with Ridley Scott to produce Life in a Day, a film that takes place over a single day made by videos submitted by users from all over the world. More than 80,000 videos, roughly 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted. And let’s not forget Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hitRECord, a production company that utilizes crowdsourced content. (In fact, JGL recently put out a call for animators and voiceover artists).
The use of six-second Vine videos certainly makes the post-production process a little easier, but will the inherent rapid nature of the medium give the film a staccato rhythm that lacks cohesion? Will the different styles of the content creators mesh? In any case, it’s a progressive concept for brands that could lead to unique content and audience engagement.
With Tribeca’s #6SECFILM Competition and the first crowdsourced Vine short film, a Vine feature film can’t be too far off, right? Maybe it’ll star Ryan Gosling.
