Shared Creation Projects

This time line is also published among the source notes at http://consumed.ning.com/

Tags: End, Film, of, Outline, Plot, World

Image via Wikipedia

The rise of blogging, community and social networking sites has over the years led to more and more people running 365 day creative projects. Essentially what this means that everyday for year someone commits to publishing something new onto a web site. Typically a photograph or a piece of writing, although the rise of cheap video cameras and webcams has meant that an increasing number of people are producing daily videos.

A 365 day challenge is an enormous undertaking. It is a both a creative and physical challenge. One that I have decided should be celebrated and helped along. 

I’ve decided to pick one challenge a week and bring some attention to it. People doing a challenge like this deserve respect and attention and so I’ve decided to help out.

You may ask why start in February. Well its true that January would have been better, but the truth is that during January I’ve seen a number of people start these projects and as a result I’ve been moved to pay some respect and support.

Lets take a look at the first of our 365 day projects.

This is Rachaels 365 project and you can find it at http://rachael365project.posterous.com/

It’s owned by Rachael Phillips a media monkey from South Wales who is working on one photograph a day. So far its a personal insight into Racheals life without being too personal or self congratulatory. If this is kept up Racheal is going to have a fascinating record. The initial reason for doing this was to make sure that she picks up a camera everyday. This is an excellent reason. A picture a day really will improve compositional and photographic skill.

Tags: 365, challenge, Day, project

When working on anything that involves story telling it is important to be clear about what happens next, about how the story moves from the start, to the middle to the end. This could be a problem when inviting people to add short films into a project. In order to help out here are two of the films in Consumed and how the plot opens out from these.

First a creature that was a man hunts two girls out for a walk in the woods.

And Now – A bitten girl slowly dies and turns into a zombie

Both of these can accessed from the community site built for evolvement of this film project. You can find it at http://consumed.ning.com/ .  This post will also be listed on the community to help with the process of building the zombies films.

If you’ve watched these two films you’ll see that a zombie in Consumed can just look like a dirty and deranged man charging through the woods like an animal and also that the process of becoming a zombie is a process that slowly removes concentration, thought and personality until all that is left is a shell.

So what next?

We have a situation where two zombies are wandering in a countryside area. My target is for these is to build up the picture on how they work by having an encounter with more people. What I want to show is how from one zombie we have two, then more and then many more. We’re not looking an uncounted zombies coming from the ground, but a process where a small number of attacks causes an increasing number of zombies. I’m going to be producing a timeline for this, a timeline on something small turns into something big.

This means that the call for contributions should be for encounters with just one zombie. A number of films showing how one zombie attacks groups of people can then be viewed as a pattern. How attacks in many locations contribute towards something dark and terrifying. The rise of the zombie.

Tags: Film, story, story so far, story telling, what happens next, Zombie

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Many people face similar problems when they first start to exercise their creative muscles; coming in 2 parts; quality and perceived quality. First of all there is quality is your work technically good enough. The problem of perceived quality is how do you decide that your work is worthy?

I’m not going to face the technical issue of quality. There are metrics for all arts regarding what is good and bad and I’m not going to hit specifics on each one here. What I will say is that if you do not know do two things. First of all spend some time understanding your art, and spend some time testing the water with the many communities that exist on the Internet.  Learning and demonstrating what you can do. Neither of these methods is foolproof, but they are a good start.

What I really want to talk about is a perception of quality. Many people who start off on the creative trail don’t really think their work is good enough. This builds a tendency prove to yourself that your work is of high enough quality by embarking on ever more complex and difficult schemes. The need to prove quality can result in creative projects that are simply too big and complex to succeed in a reasonable time frame; and timing is important. If it takes too long to achieve something then becoming disheartened is easy and that can block all future progress, and if that happens a potential talent can be lost.

This raises the question how do you believe in quality and stop things from becoming too complicated?

The answer is to stop and take a look at the real world with fresh eyes. Success in the real world is usually achieved by those things that are accessible and to the point. There’s a word for this – it is simplicity. Seriously the biggest success are usually so simple it is unbelievable, and often called genius. 

Here are some examples

One of the most famous T shirt designs of all time – 1 bold word (Relax).

A piece of classic 20th century art – a can of soup.

The biggest show on UK TV – lets hear people sing and judge them.

Keep going – I bet you can come up with plenty of good ideas yourselves.

The point I am trying to make is do not discard an idea, an image, or a piece of prose because it seems too simple to be worthy, professional or special. Try instead to see if your work is striking, eye-catching or imaginative. The key to success is not impossible complexity. It is something that has a good blend of simplicity and originality. 

Don’t be blighted by rejecting the something that may seem basic. Revel in its simplicity, because if it connects to you, it probably does the same to someone else.

Break the fear of simplicity and hopefully success will follow.

Tags: Art, classic, complex, complicated, how, simplicity, to achieve

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Not so long ago I was musing regarding how to best assemble a community around the idea of building a zombie film in small pieces with community contributors. I had basically come to the point the decision that the community should either be self hosted using Elgg as an engine, or that it should be hosted on Ning.com.

I did some thinking and testing and over the holiday period and then I established a community site on Ning.

So why did I make the decision to move to Ning?

First of all by not self-hosting all the maintenance work is done for me. This frees up a lot of time on my part. I don’t have to worry about security updates, backups or maintaining the infrastructure. This means that I can focus on the important things – the content and the community. I think this is an important point. Its very easy to have a grand web idea, and then find yourself bogged down in design, updates, backups and other annoying tasks that have nothing to do with your community. I have a feeling that more and more of the web will be sites like Ning – that allow you to do a job and get on with what is important to you, whilst someone else does the dirty work.

So that explains the move to Ning.

Doesn’t say anything bad about Elgg. It’s very powerful software.

So now I have an empty community. What am I going to do with it?

The first thing to do is start establishing content. Its the old mantra of the web – if you have content they will come. After all an empty web site does very little for anyone. To date I’ve started to group together some of the current batch of Consumed Videos, and I’ve also started to add in a bit more general information. There is a long way to go before this site contains everything that I want. My plan is not to hurry and to just keep up a slow and persistent pressure of adding things.  That’s the content covered. Of course if no one knows about the site it could well stay empty. So I will be blogging, tweeting and talking about the Consumed community. Once people start joining and if all goes well adding their own material we will hopefully get to the point where the community snowballs.

This brings me onto the next point. What is this community all about?

The idea is very simple. The Consumed Community has 3 jobs

• Provide a resource for publishing the growing body of work in the Consumed film project
• Provide a source of information for any one wanting to contribute their own work to the consumed project.
• Provide tips, assistance and community for an amateur film maker but particularly those wanting to make a zombie film

Consumed.ning.com is an open forum for anyone interest in amateur films and zombie films. It is incredibly early days yet but it is hoped that something valuable will grow from this. 

So that is the why and the plan. Now all we need to do is see what happens next.

If you interested why not join consumed.ning.com

Tags: Community, Film, Open, Public, Zombie

Image via Wikipedia

A quick break from the usual exploration of creating a zombie film. An idea free for anyone to use.

We enter the second decade of the twenty-first century and we are long overdue according to the annals of Science Fiction for some deep space flight and whilst there is no doubt that there is some exploration coming up, what about long term colonization? What about for the first time making mankind a creature of more than one world? 

Exploration for the sake of science is being run by the usual agencies, and commerce is making its first tentative steps into space but will this be enough to uproot a sizeable number of people into a risky enterprise with a small chance of returning home and even bigger financial cost? The question has to be who can move people with nothing more than blind trust and who has in principle the ability to invest the required resources with none of those nasty business and commercial entanglements.

My thoughts turn to religion. Religion has great power and great need. Traditionally when we think of man in space we think of National Pride, the Power of Currency and Corporation. But what if it religion moves man into space. What if religion seeks to deliver its message beyond Earth?

I first thought of the Church of Rome. Largest in the world and with obvious riches. It is too conservative – what is needed is a church of radical thinking. A church that has historic links to science and to undertaking great deeds.

I’m thinking about Islam.

Forget about the image painted by the media of crazed suicide bombers wanting to take down the West and instead think of a religion that once upon a time inspired great science and art. Think also of a religion that is behind ethical banking and which is capable of invoking great acts of passion. Imagine what would happen if Islam went back up being a patron of sciences.

Whilst the West worries about the cost and commercial return of space exploration imagine what would happen if a religion existing outside of our established rules of commerce and research put together a colony to Mars purely on religious grounds.

I’ve no idea what such a colony would look like. 

I do know that it would shake the world.

Imagine another world established by a non secular state establishing laws and morality as it saw fit, and distanced from Earth by both the void of space and long travel times almost anything could develop.

So perhaps we should not be thinking as writers about transplanting ourselves and our culture but instead think beyond that into something that is different but not so far from home.

Tags: Colony, Fiction, Islam, Mars, Mosques, Science, social, Society

The Consumed project – that started as making a short zombie feature, which has now evolved into telling a story through short films and this blog has got me thinking. What I would like to do is continue the making of Consumed whilst making it easy to allow others to contribute to the project. By contribute I mean adding writing, video, photographs and ideas, but only on the condition that every one else who has an interest in amateur film making gets to use them. This borrowing an idea from world of Open Source Software. Where everyone contributes to create something greater than any one individual can achieve. Want to see how good Open Source can get – take a look at the Firefox web browser.

If Consumed can be successfully opened up it will create a resource that will help the film be completed, but which will also assist other new film makers in their own work. As  films and ideas are contributed and shared everyone gets to benefit from something that becomes bigger than themselves.

This means building an online community and a method of sharing work and files.

To a small extent this has already started on Facebook, and as good a platform Facebook is for fun and discussion I am not convinced it is ready for hosting a big shared and completely open project.

That leaves me looking for ways to host this. I don’t want to spend too much time on the construction of a web site. That would distract from the content that I want it to build. So options?

There are many, but 2 so far are standing out for me.

The first is Ning.com. Ning has a fine pedigree and is entirely well suited to building up a focussed and niche community. It is high on my list of contenders for supplying a home to an open film project.

Its not alone. I recently discovered Elgg. Elgg is a self hosting open source software designed to allow the construction of a sharing online community exactly as you want to.

Both of these are fine options. I haven’t quite made my mind up yet.

So in the spirit of sharing – let me know what you think. I want this to a resource for anyone who will find it useful. Stands to reason that people should voice their opinions on in it.

Tags: Elgg, Film, Ning, Open, Site, Web