Hamey

Do you think 50,000 people from all over the world who have never met each other could make a feature film? A Swarm of Angels is a web 2.0 community aiming to create exactly that, with a budget of £1m by gathering 50,000 people willing to contribute £25 each. The film gets released under creative commons and any profit gets put into the next project. The project was launched early this year, so it now time to check in.

There are 5 phases to their funding, the first two have been achieved presumably taking them to the first £125,000 of seed money. Interestingly enough, they freeze membership between phases which seems irrational, after all if I’m interested enough now to take out my wallet then why stop me? Obviously this is a long way from the 50,000 target, but the web has always proved that the first stage of an idea is the hardest, and it would be safe to say A Swarm of Angels has ticked that box. What provides some confidence to the concept is their strong sense of process, threaded through their website and identity:

FUND / FILM / FLOW

Fund the project. Call for collaborators. Publicize and create marketing materials. Gather the first 1000 members through targeting niche online communities and parts of the blogosphere. Develop the project and infrastructure. Start script development. Open the project up to more members.

Film. Collaborate. Develop scripts using a Wiki. Crew through The Swarm. Funding drive for pre-production/production/post-production. Create marketing and final materials.

Flow. Master materials. Create spin-off materials. Publicize. Burn. Upload. Seed. Download. View. Remix. Share.

What I would like to see is a broader execution of the open source film concept. A Swarm of Angels has a reasonable amount of predefined concepts that are then steered by the community. It would be great to see a community / web app that is built to nurture the entire process for independent film groups, from funding, resources, distribution etc. This could have real commercial value and guide the complicated path of independent film production with the obvious benefits of crowdsourcing.