Live blogging from NAB session “Mass Animation: Crowdsourced Creativity on the Social Networking Frontier”
April 21st, 2009 by Seth Kenvin
- Mass Animation project to make an animated short movie through a Facebook application that got 60,000 applicants, of whom 50, worldwide, were selected to collaborate
- Versus domination of motion picture animation field by male American professionals, skewing older, the mass animation project was >50% overseas participants, >50% female, age range of 13-48, and many students & people moonlighting from other professions
- In big studios very few people influence directions of projects, but when process is democratized so that every contributing artist can access & weigh in on every aspect, the result is enriched by more voices influencing
- Dynamic & simultaneous crowd participation in creative development, with Darwinism applied to select results, significantly compresses timeframes and can contain costs
- A common liability of user-generated content is the lack of a tight story, but when people collaborate and each scrutinizes the others’ work the results can be superior to the random shooting & uploading that can be found so much now
- Script and storyboard are vital guides to direct dispersed animators towards a project converging on a tight end result and not elements overly challenging to stitch together
- Distributed creative contribution is getting sufficiently proven to drive full length feature animation or development of an entire video game
