The Crowdforce is Strong in This One.

I am not too convinced of crowdsourcing, more precisely, most of the ways I observed crowdsourcing in practice. Most of the times you get the feeling companies use crowds to get cheap ideas and designs. You know what I mean, first three get a small price and the company then picks a random design from the pool of thousands of submissions they got for free and now own.

But Casey Pugh’s StarWarsUncut is a whole new set of awesome and it shows the way to make exciting things happen together with the multitude of creative people on the web. For StarWarsUncut the original Star Wars: A New Hope was split up into 472 parts of 15 seconds each. People could claim segments and submit their interpretation of it. All clips will be stitched together to make up a whole new experience of the classic. As of April 9, the team of StarWarsUncut announced that the movie is finished and posted the first trailer.

Star Wars: Uncut Trailer from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

I don’t know about you, but this looks amazing and exciting. So many brilliant ideas in so little time. I wonder what the full movie experience feels like, but I can’t wait to see the whole thing.

There is also a five minute teaser available: Teaser here.

Create advertising for Watchmen

The Watchman-Movie is already in postproduction and now director Zack Snyder has announced an advertising contest on the Watchmen Youtube channel. Fans are invited to create and submit commercials to be shown on TV screens in the background of the movie. 

The idea to give fans out there the opportunity to create a real part of the movie is genius. It genuinely challenges fans. Much more than, say, “Send us your craziest picture of you using product XYZ!”. And, nice side effect, it also creates buzz without showing too much of the movie. I wonder what the commercials will look like.

Btw, here is a screenshot of another movie I expect with rising enthusiam: Spike Jonze’s “Where the wild things are” (“Wo die Wilden Kerle hausen”).

And now excuse me, I am off to do some market research and insight hunting for Veidt products in my copy of Watchmen.

Edit: Crap. Martin has pointed out the entry rules to me, who limit the contest to U.S. residents only. I’d understand that if it was a domestic U.S. brand, but this is a movie for global release. Well done, legal department. You have just locked out two thirds of the Internet, because the risk to pay flight tickets for a guy from Abkhazia was too high.

 

  • April 25, 2008
  • Visual Arts
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