Last King of Scotland director Kevin Macdonald has spent the last six months with his team directing and editing the 4,500 hours of footage from 192 countries into a contiguous feature that will screen as part of the Premieres section of the fest. All of the contributors whose footage was used are credited as co-directors, and 26 have been invited to attend the premiere (full list below).

The trailer below is the first glimpse we have of the direction the film took in the editing. A single film from a Spanish contributor, the piece suggests a feel-good personalized world-scape as it were…but I will have to withhold further comment until next week. Watch the premiere here share your comments here – I look forward to your opinions!

Thursday, Jan 27th at 9PM EST
youtube.com/lifeinaday

Stainboy is an anti-superhero superhero, whose only talent is his uncontrollable production and smearing of greasy stains everywhere he goes. In the series, he works for the Burbank police, and at the start of each episode he is ordered to investigate and bring in social outcasts. Many of the outcasts are characters from Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy where the Stainboy character made its first appearance in two short poems.

Beginning today, November 22nd until December 6th, anyone can submit lines on Twitter for the next episode of the Stainboy story, hashtagged #BurtonStory. In what Burton himself describes as an “Exquisite Corpse” experiment, the story will be created 140 characters or less at a time, to yield an episode likely less than five minutes, which is how long the previous animated episodes ran.

Here you can see the 6th installment of the popular flash animation series launched in 2000. In this final episode, we flashback to Stainboy’s beginnings in the weird kids orphanage in Burbank.

STAIN BOY

Of all the super heroes,
the strangest one by far,
doesn’t have a special power,
or drive a fancy car.

next to Superman and batman, I guess he must seem tame.
But to me he is quite special,
and Stain Boy is his name.

He can’t fly around tall buildings,
or outrun a speeding train,
the only talent he seems to have
is to leave a nasty stain.

Sometimes I know it bothers him,
that he can’t run or swim or fly,
and because of this one ability,
his dry cleaning bill is sky-high.

After watching the final selections, I decided to post two of the most interesting, provocative and relevant pieces.

The first, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake turns out interestingly enough to be from the oldest artist in the lineup from what I can tell. Yet Perry Bard’s is the most interactive, having crowdsourced the footage that appears in the “remake” half of the screen. Footage was “shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929) and upload them to her site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences, and streams the submissions as a film.”

Most interesting to me is the fact that Vertov’s original 1929 film was itself a future-leaning re-invention of the visual narrative, an “database” style of montage that comes to mirror the experience of a platform like Youtube.

And from a young former Air Force Security Forces soldier, is Post Newtonianism (WAR FOOTAGE/CALL OF DUTY 4 MODERN WARFARE FOOTAGE), a terribly disturbing but arresting combination of a loop of actual war footage with gameplay from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Josh Bricker mixes “the in-game audio with a Wikileaks-released video of the U.S. military killing of two Reuters reporters and unarmed civilians.”

There was MySpace, then YouTube, then Facebook, Twitter followed by every other niched and slightly varied social network. I love the idea of social media for a number of reasons, aesthetic, personal and political. Nothing warms my heart more than the idea that someone behind a firewall in Iran could connect with me sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles during the controversial political situation that arose from the 2009 Iranian election. I also enjoy the casual exchange of interesting ideas and happenings that is the stuff of Facebook friendships.

So here we are, in 2010 with so many ways to connect, form communities and find kindred spirits online. Yet for all the fun we have watching viral videos, getting recommendations from friends on what movies to watch, or playing Mafia Wars with them on Facebook, are we really accessing the best and brightest of what’s in that enormous web-o-sphere?

Let’s imagine for a second that the web is like a frontier, say, how most of America was before the 19th century. And suddenly, from literally a few hundred thousand settlers, 100 million people showed up and populated the land. You’d have something akin to the chaos that happens when people are displaced after massive disasters or wars. Nobody would what the rules were, how to find anything and the one guy who had the map of the entire land might be the most valuable person around.

I’m going to call the Mr. Wise Sage Google. So Google comes in and says: ask me a question, any question. You need to know where the nearest river is so you can access water? I can tell you? You need to know where you can find lumber to build your houses? Here, I’ll show you. Then slowly but surely, this massive number of people settle down, with the help of Mr. W.S. Google. A few years goes by, Mr. Google teaches a few classes, and people learn more about their world, how to find things and they come up with their own maps and books and ideas.

Then, another few years go by, and as people get when they are well fed and comfortable, they get bored, restless. They have a few books and games and songs they brought from the old country which they’ve read over and over again. The kids want something new, different so soon you get some young whippersnapper called Mr. Hot Stuff Youtube who invents a new, novel idea: anyone can come up with a brand new game, or story and share it with the rest of their community. Wow! The kids go wild. They love it. They tell stories of birds falling from trees; babies laughing, dancing, talking in funny ways. And everyone laughs heartily. A few of these kids become really well known all over the land and everyone agrees: the new age is upon us.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the adults are thinking: hmm, these babies dancing, are they really that interesting? They’ve seen babies do all kinds of extraordinary things in their lives and so this just doesn’t seem that exciting. But every once in a while, they see something beautiful, a performance that makes them think and look a little harder. But in between working, eating and sleeping, it’s hard to find those beautiful interesting ideas. So they just give up because mostly it looks like rubbish to them.

Then suddenly, riding on a gorgeous, shiny black horse, a familiar face from the old world appears, but he looks very different from what they remember, and his name is Mr. Slick Interface Hulu. He brings fantastic entertainment and beautiful packaging and everyone is happy, young and old because it gives the old folks what they want and does it just how the kids like it. For a while, everyone is happy. But as humans are inclined, they get bored with Mr. S.I. Hulu’s offerings and the rumblings for more entertainment begin.

At this point, the kids, who are still playing with Mr. H.S. Youtube’s ideas have grown up a little. They’re talking about politics, and music and art, and real stories, not just babies and animals and farting. Even the old folks notice that they are drawn to the new wave of inventions. But now, there’s a problem: there’s so much of this stuff that no one can find what they like. Even the kids are starting to get frustrated because there’s so much out there.

Enter a new-old character: Ms. Smart Thinking Curator. Ms. Curator was once a kid who played with H.S. Youtube ideas. Now she has traveled, been educated by curators of from the old country and developed some tastes of her own. The old folks love her because she understands their language, and the kids like her because she’s one of them. Ms. S.T. Curator suggests a simple new idea: How about if I figure out what everyone’s into: so the people who love puppies and babies can have as much as their hearts desire and the best of the Shiba Inus in the universe. Then those political rabble-rousers, who want to hear and participate in arguments all day long can have their own little corner. And same with the people who love food, clothes, horses and so on. And because Ms. S.T. Curator knows that people want to taste the product before they sign up, she spends a little time explaining why those puppies she selected are the best puppies in the entire world. And Voila! The curation of entertainment is born.

So now I ask, is it not time to trust some new voices and tastes to curate entertainment for us? I don’t discount the voices of the masses, nor am I unaware of the significant challenges in aggregating and distributing video/film in a meaningful way online. BUT, with the advent of interfaces like Boxee and to some extent Roku (and other such devices) which make it possible to combine many entertainment sources this is imminently possible. I see that Clicker is attempting some such organization although my argument about them is that they are still quite neutral in their aggregation and not aggressively curatorial.

I believe we are entering the age of the Curator. There is plenty of entertainment being created that is difficult to access or find. What we need are assured voices who understand contemporary tastes and can do a better and more effective job than the crusty and outmoded TV and film studio executives of bringing relevant content to the attention of interested audiences.

So while technology inventions and killer apps are amazing, can somebody please invent the Human Curator – that would be killer.

The truth is, right now, in January 2010 most of the visual storytelling–series, one-off videos and even features you’ll find on content sites (outside of the Netflix and Hulus of the world) ARE independent. That is to say, they were created by individuals who independently decided to create and in most cases finance their own projects. Whether it cost $5 on a borrowed Flipcam to make that cat fall of the piano, or it cost $50K to make that VFX masterpiece that got 1 million views on Youtube, the bottom line is that the idea of the “independent” has gone totally mainstream.

Film and video festivals are proliferating like never before, and the amount of content at online aggregation sites is staggering. Let me put it in perspective: Back in May 2009,  YouTube’s blog said 20 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute and they point out that it would be the equivalent of over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week. Every filmmaker I know rolls their eyes about YouTube stats. So let me be clear: my point is certainly NOT that a video like Chris Crocker “Leave Britney Alone” a filmic masterpiece because it had close to 12 million hits.

Rather, my question is: What happens to “American Indie Film,” largely defined by the self-financed, autonomous creation of filmed stories by a person or group of people- either documentary or fictional, and to be possibly sold and exhibited to the public. Film schools all over the US are filled with filmmaker hopefuls wanting to do just that, and spending a lot of time and money working towards that end. (I know because I went to one of them.) One could argue that the distinction is obvious, and that my argument is at best, semantic. But I don’t think it is.

I know there are a lot of rah-rah traditional American indie filmmakers out there trying to figure out how to bring the whole kit-and-kaboodle of indie filmmaking from the analog/old/Sundance world into the digital age. And there are some wonderful resources for crowdsourcing funding, marketing and distribution evolving from these efforts. BUT, I am going to argue that the idea of American Independent filmmaking as a cultural movement defined by films all the way from the 70s through the early days of  Sundance, is over.

So while I applaud the spirit of indie creators, I’m going to call a spade a spade: most indie filmmakers (and I know this because I’ve worked on MANY indie films) bootstrap their “passion projects” so they can have a shot at the big time: Hollywood. And I’m not knocking this as a strategy. I mean who doesn’t want to get on a movie where you have a Honeywagon instead of your mom’s station wagon? However, let’s not confuse a financial/career approach with a cultural idea called “independent.” There are fewer and fewer filmmakers working outside of the cultural and even political constraints of the mainstream (as defined by Hollywood). In fact, I would venture to say, there may be more true “independent” thinking buried in the vast depths of the billon-deep YouTube video vault right now.

So maybe the moment has come to re-define “Independent Film”. Perhaps what we are really talking about is filmmaking for niche audiences, the same way cable television changed the way we see television. More rarified, maybe, but by no means does any vague set of “indie rules” apply to any work being created  in the “feature” category by a non-studio entity. I think once we get real about what it “means” to be an independent content creator, we can get down to the business of learning one or two things from folks who are having success in the vast world of online media.

Attendees following the backchannel conversations during the conference, may have noticed a thread on authorship vs. crowdsourcing (not always in polarity), which led to the subject of auteurship and whether that idea has a place within the wide open world of Transmedia. It struck me that the Purefold case study, led by AG8 was in itself an interesting connundrum for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the irony that the canon on which the project is at least conceptually based (Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner) is a work of legendary auteurship, AND that AG8′s assigned task was to create an interactive multiplatform campaign for their brand which would drive business TO their production company which represents…what else…auteurs.

The panel was called “Case Study: Transmedia Design and Conceptualization – The Making of Purefold.” AG8 are the architects of the campaign, their client is RSA and their collaborators include The Alchemists, also at the panel. For people unfamiliar with the way companies like RSA work, let me digress into their business for a second. They are essentially production companies which also act as exclusive reps of commercial and music video directors – the directors’ marketability is based on their reputation as visual auteurs. When ad agencies have a commercial to produce, they take bids and creative proposals from a host of RSA-like companies and often make their decisions based on the creative compatibility of the campaign to the director and/or the strength of their creative approach to the advertisers concept.

For many years, companies like RSA rode the tide of an endless flow of million-dollar commercials and flourished by incubating the best visual creatives in the business. With the changing landscape of TV and the ad business pulling back from the traditional :30 ad and drastically slashed budgets in the last couple of years, these companies began struggling, and a number have since folded. RSA’s Scott family – Ridley,the most famous and his brother Tony, their brood of budding young Scott auteurs and other well-known film and television directors have managed to (barely) stay relevant because they have a lot of well-established brand names in their stable. But these companies are facing an unprecedented crisis, and they are desperately trying to find a way to keep their directors employed in an era of diversified advertising strategies and the proliferation of social media.

I go into this level of detail on the business because I find it deeply fascinating that the key tool – crowdsourcing – of an brand campaign – Purefold – aiming to keep RSA relevant is at complete odds with the very fiber of RSA’s business – singularity of artistic/aesthetic vision. This certainly signals the willingness of RSA to step into the new world of branding and storytelling BUT, what sort of bedfellows will the “crowd” and the RSA auteurs eventually make under their in their Creative Commons alliance? It is of course too early to tell as the project is still in process and their presentation was primarily focused on genesis and process and not yet on the creative results.

When David Bausola and Tom Himpe, principals at AG8, presented their method of crowdsourcing they used the word “harvesting”, a description which also appears on their website. The method: by seeding Friendfeed conversations with concepts/ideas that RSA auteurs have invented, they conduct what is essentially a real-time study of what people are saying about this subjects, all riffing (if I understood this correctly) on the core theme of “empathy”. Needless to say the world “harvesting” caused an instant flurry of reactions on the Twitter backchannel during the conference as attendees bristled at the semantic implication of the word. Defenders of the method responded saying that because they created the project under Creative Commons which allows sharing and remixing, the method does not in fact imply exploitation as some felt it did.

I chimed in on this Twitter chatter myself, as I think this unease between the “crowd” and the auteurs or their agents, in this case the Purefold team is something which has not yet been fully considered. In our zeal as storytellers to jump on the crowdsourcing wagon, many issues of authorship remain unanswered. Is curation the new auteurship? How is crowdsourcing in Purefold different from me browsing a news site or reading a magazine and tapping into the Zeitgeist in a way that informs my artistic work? On one hand, I understand that only through experiments like Purefold do these issues fully play out in a way that allows new paths to be forged and on the other, I worry about a world of participation in which the rules are either too obscure for the players to be aware, or in which the auteur is forced to crowdsource simply because it creates the appearance of some sort of creative democracy.