Here at the workbook project we are big fans of A Swarm of Angels and anxiously await Matt’s newest open content resource ViewShareRemix. ASOA is a groundbreaking open source film project and Matt has been at the forefront of all things digital for years, in fact Matt is up for top 100 innovators award.
WB: Can you explain A Swarm of Angels and how the community plays a role in the film?
MH: A Swarm of Angels is about creating cult cinema for the digital age: remixing the whole process from conception to completion of a feature film to include the audience, and allowing it to engage fully with the digital world and online possibilities. There’s been all these formal ways Hollywood has used to test audience reaction and build demand for a film, but the kind of participative filmmaking A Swarm of Angels is part of creating is in its infancy, so its a giant experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. People join because they want to be part of that community and help pioneer the whole process. They know they can help shape it, make it happen.
WB: What is the concept behind A Swarm of Angels and what lead to its creation?
MH: A Swarm of Angels an open movie, a participative feature film. Lots of projects were tiptoeing around innovating in particular areas, tinkering with this and that, and I really wanted to engage with all these ideas that are prevalent in the online world, but are slower to leak into offline settings.
I decided to create the Swarm after writing some books on digital film, and thinking I wanted to develop some of the ideas I’d been writing about, and get back into direct production — I’d been producing, directing and commissioning a bunch of the more experimental end of things through the onedotzero digital film festival/production company I previously created.
The catalyst for all this? Before I became a digital film specialist I wrote as a film critic for style magazines in London. The Face, Dazed & Confused, that sort of thing. I had the opportunity to meet and interview some great directors. But a particular feeling of excitement stayed with me one day: Pulp Fiction, a movie that was to change the face of cinema at the time, was just about to be released. Earlier that day I had just interviewed the movie’s director Quentin Tarantino, and now I was in the producer’s office. He showed me a series of designs for the U.S. poster and asked me which I preferred. I don’t know if I influenced the final decision at all, but the one I picked was the final poster that appeared around the country. That feeling of excitement, of having been part of this great cultural moment stayed with me. When I had the idea to create A Swarm of Angels, I imagined how I could develop that feeling so others could experience it. I wanted to create a feature film project that people could have an influence in. It might be something small, quick and easy like a vote, or if someone could picture putting more effort into it then it would be something bigger - a trailer, an effect or design, storyline or piece of dialogue.
WB: Looking forward what type of role do you see audiences playing in the process of creating and distributing films?
MH: I see the relationship between filmmaker and fan become closer and more
symbiotic - its not a create and consume one-way street anymore. Filmmakers will inevitably after open up their creative worlds to the audiences they want to engage with, as individuals expect to interact with the media they consume rather than simply being targeted and talked to. There’s many ways these interactions can take place and we’re in the wild west period of that with a handful of projects that are currently testing the frontiers.
WB: Do you think audiences are looking for a richer experience with their media and if so what have you personally seen that shows this?
MH: Everyone is creative in some respect, and everyone wants to be heard: if you can develop projects which allow that to happen and also fulfill your goals as an artist you are onto a win-win situation. You can already see this with fan fiction, user-generated wiki’s and fan communities, et al. Personally, I think there’s so many possibilities to screen bleed artistic realities and narratives, push them beyond the traditional boundaries of the screen. Other people might call this transmedia storytelling, and you see alternate reality games pushing this envelope.
The amount of ideas and suggestions that have been generated with the Swarm community on the two scripts we’ve been developing has been amazing - it illustrates audiences want to plug in their skills and contribute when they can to making something bigger. Apparently this has been identified as one of the key features of happiness. I was watching a talk by Jane McGonigal, the games designer, who mentioned that ‘extreme collaboration will be the most important human ability in the next decade’.
WB: What is next for you?
1: Greenlighting the first A Swarm of Angels feature film.
2: Launching the open content resource, ViewShareRemix.
3: Doing a couple of super-small video projects with my kids.
The amount of ideas and suggestions that have been generated with the Swarm community on the two scripts we’ve been developing has been amazing - it illustrates audiences want to plug in their skills and contribute when they can to making something bigger. Apparently this has been identified as one of the key features of happiness. I was watching a talk by Jane McGonigal, the games designer, who mentioned that ‘extreme collaboration will be the most important human ability in the next decade’.
