A few years ago I had the pleasure of watching Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, a Finnish feature-length Star Trek spoof that had astonishingly assured special effects and blue-screen work for an amateur production. (The whole thing was put together over seven years by a handful of enthusiasts.) More astonishing was that the film cost only $20,000 to make, making use of consumer equipment, off-the-shelf software, and a lot of creative handiwork.
I'm eagerly awaiting the release of their second film, Iron Sky, in which Nazis who establish a secret moon base in 1945 return to Earth in the present day. But I'm also waiting to see the first tangible results of Wreck A Movie, the group's open-source filmmaking initiative.
Using the experience they gained from Star Wreck and Iron Sky, the folks behind Wreck A Movie are providing collaboration tools for making movies -- not just in the sense of allowing far-flung members of a production team to communicate, but of allowing interested people to volunteer their time and expertise in the production of a film.
(Yes, I'm painfully aware of how the term "film" is inaccurate here -- it's likely that no celluloid will be harmed during the making of any of these productions. But I still say I go to record stores, so cut me some slack.)
While this may sound anarchic, in some ways it's not too different from how films are actually made. In the real world, films have a few people in control, namely the director, various producers as well as assorted studio executives. Few of these people will worry about the nitty gritty of, say, a movie's publicity posters, but someone among them will make sure the designers have an idea of what's expected of them and keep an eye on the results. The same applies with Wreck A Movie, with each film having a production leader to guide the team.
The actual tools are still in alpha, but I would say the time is just about right for Wreck A Movie to come into being. Its founders have already proved that quality low-budget, collaborative filmmaking is doable; equipment and software have only gotten cheaper and/or more powerful in the ten years since they started Star Wreck; more Internet users are connected via broadband, which is necessary for moving media files; fewer film festivals make 35mm film an absolute requirement for submission; and DVD distribution gets cheaper with every passing second. Whether or not Wreck A Movie (or its descendents) upends Hollywood remains to be seen; but in the meantime, I welcome anything that will make it easier for people with talent and good ideas to get their work out there.
