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Online Community Comes Up With First Crowdsourced Animated Film

By Chris Gomez - Posted on 20 July 2009

Some people in Hollywood aren't going to like this. The rest of the us, however, probably will.

Last week saw the debut of "Live Music," a short five-minute animated film about an electric guitar named Riff who falls in love with a violin named Vanessa. It's kind of a rock version of Romeo and Juliet, complete with mocking cymbals, keyboards, and other musical instruments.

What's interesting about this film is that it wasn't made by Pixar, even if the radical plot and setting seems so like them. Nope, "Live Music" was made entirely by animators around the world, collaborating on the project over the Internet.

The upstart animation group Mass Animation, led by Yair Landau, spearheaded the effort. They released the plot, the soundtrack, and some computer animation software on Facebook, for interested animators who wanted to help out in the project.

According to Landau, more than 500,000 Facebook users signed up to help out. In the end, shots from 51 animators were chosen for the final product, which Mass Animation took only $1 million and six months to produce. The animators came from all over the world -- 40 men and 11 men, and between the ages of 14 and 48.

Sony Entertainment Pictures has seen the short and, very impressed, offered to screen it as an opener for their November 12 animated film, Planet 51.

No one really expects "Live Music" to win or get nominated for any award, but you'll have to admit -- all the major animating studios started somewhere. Open-source filmmaking sounds so attractive that I'm pretty sure more crowdsourcing animating "studios" will pop up on Facebook and other social media platforms soon enough.

There's also little doubt that Sony and the other big names in animation will try to leverage this new way of generating good content to their advantage.

But apparently, not everyone likes the idea. Soon after Mass Animation came into the public eye, a group called Anti Mass Animation also opened up on Facebook. They degraded Mass Animation's efforts, calling them "manipulative" and "insulting," among other things.

Meh. Probably Republicans.

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