I came up with the germ of this idea a few years ago when I was doing a lot of 3D work and noticed there were a ton of coders out there writing open source software and providing it for free to “stick it to the man.” I thought it would be an interesting social experiment if an open source movie were created. It would be like: the longest list of credits ever. Possibly longer than the actual movie itself. At the time it wasn’t a good fit for any of our existing clients so I shelved it. After winning the Nokia account we were assigned to compete with all of the other agencies in their pool, including traditional, media, pr, etc. for the first assignment. We won hands down with an idea that would let mobile phone users create a film in collaboration with friends or complete strangers, anytime and anywhere. It made perfect sense because most people have their phones with them at all times, and the saturation of camera phones and phones with video capabilities were looking really good. A user could contribute in a variety of ways. Musicians could upload their personal creations, and the same applied to mobile photographers and video enthusiasts. This was a chance to take the over-used UGC model and crank it up a notch. Those that submitted SMS messages were more like poets and inspirers to the creators of music, photos and videos.
We hired Spike Lee because, not only is he a great director, but because he loves good film in whatever form it takes, and ironically, also loves to “stick it to the man” (Hollywood.) When he signed on as the director he came up with a movie theme that would involve three acts: birth, life and death.
Each of those acts would have winners that would automatically go to the premiere of the final film, but in the end Spike could use elements from any piece of submitted content. It was essentially a massive library of content to work from. This project was seriously one of the longest, most challenging projects I've ever worked on, and fortunately I had a very dedicated and talented team to help get us to the finish line: the premiere. This project, just like most films, had a lot of moving parts like trailers, pre premiere videos, interviews and all of that. At the end of the day we had over 100,000 participants. I think we would have had more if we hadn’t had our hand forced to use Yahoo’s JumpCut “beta” online editing suite. I know it took me about three days just to figure out how to work it properly (see my “Life Is Good” video) I think the clients responsible for that decision have admitted under their breath that they should have listened to Tribal. FYI, JumpCut is shutting down.

Here are some pieces from top down:
• Homepage screen grab
• Brief video overview with Spike Lee commentary.
• Frame grabs from the site and news
• “Life Is Good”, a sample submission I created using the JumpCut online editing suite, to help set the bar for the users. I think I used about 80 or so pieces of content from the library.
• The trailer, which played online and in Blue Tooth enabled events.
• Spike’s final cut of the film, which premiered live in LA and simulcast online on the Nokia USA premiere site.