Film Futurist

The best part of Ridley Scott’s video pitch for “Life In A Day” is him slipping into the fact that a vodka martini makes him happy. This precious nugget, at 1:07 in the clip below might had been missed had it not been for the weird and suddenly useful subtitling provided.

Before you throw me into the the hater camp, hear me out. I don’t hate Ridley Scott. In fact, I admire him a great deal. The man was and is a legend to all aspiring filmmakers who at some point encountered the stunning, prescient piece of filmmaking that is Bladerunner while learning to make films. It was with some excitement that I examined his recently announced “Life In A Day” project, launched in collaboration with the Sundance Film Festival and Youtube.

Below is the video explaining the project, which is fairly self-explanatory: The film director Kevin McDonald will accept crowdsourced video from YOU, shot on a single day, and will create a feature length “experimental documentary” to be shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

On the surface, it seems the focus is to engage viewers, aspiring filmmakers, and create a narrative that ties the globe together in a neat way, sort of like, um…a commercial. At three minutes, Nike’s Write the Future World Cup ad is exactly THAT, only shorter, more exciting and actually ABOUT something. Nike’s spot is a brilliant, energetic, beautiful and poignant celebration of a world’s fascination with a single sport – about how the love for a game can be experienced across cultures.

While I’m not saying that such meaning and profundity as soccer sometimes inspires cannot be found randomly around the globe about other subjects. I just want to know – what subjects exactly? What is it ABOUT, people? I wish these large scale, commercially overblown so-called experimental projects would have meaning, otherwise it becomes a waste of the crowdsource, just another marketing ploy to keep the old school relevant in the new media world, something I referred to in my post about Ridley Scott’s initial foray into this arena, via the (now defunct)Purefold initiative back in November of last year.

Crowdsourced art isn’t about broad, jumbled collaborative initiatives asking everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. It should be about taking a point of view on a real subject and hunting down the truth and beauty in an idea, like artists are supposed to do, if they care about their art.