The Power of the Collective
Crowdsourcing is a production model that takes a large task and distributes it among a crowd of people, typically unpaid volunteers who are passionate about the project. Crowdsourced content, therefore, is any piece of media—be it a film, a video, or a collection of photos—that was created through the small, individual contributions of many.
This model leverages the power and creativity of a community to create something that would be impossible for a single person or small team to achieve. It is a fundamentally collaborative and democratic form of creation, and it has been used to create some truly unique and ambitious projects in the world of film and fandom.
Crowdsourcing in Film and Fandom
There are two primary ways that crowdsourcing has been applied to film-related content:
- Collaborative Fan Films: These are the most ambitious examples. In these projects, a classic film is broken down into hundreds of tiny segments (e.g., 15 seconds each). Fans from all over the world then claim a segment and remake it in their own unique style—be it live-action, animation, stop-motion, or puppetry. All of these individual clips are then stitched together in the correct order to re-create the entire feature film. The most famous of these is Star Wars Uncut, a fan-made recreation of A New Hope that won an Emmy Award. The result is a chaotic, creative, and joyful tribute to the original work.
- Marketing Campaigns: Studios have adopted crowdsourcing as a marketing tactic to drive fan engagement. A studio might launch a campaign asking fans to submit short videos of themselves re-enacting a famous scene or showing off their fandom. The best of these submissions are then edited together into a promotional “fan trailer” or tribute video. This not only generates a huge amount of user-generated content but also makes the fans feel like they are a part of the film’s promotional journey. Ridley Scott’s production company famously created the film Life in a Day by crowdsourcing footage from thousands of people who filmed their lives on a single day.