A Swarm of Angels (ASOA) was an open source film project and participatory film community, whose aim was to make the world's first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. The collaborative project aimed to attract 50,000 individual subscribers (the "Swarm of Angels"), each contributing £25 to the production, but after three years only 1,000 subscriptions were made. This feature film and associated original media project embraces the
Creative Commons notion of flexible copyright licensing, to permit people to freely download, share, and remix the original media made for the project.
A Swarm of Angels is the brainchild of film producer and author
Matt Hanson
Matt Hanson (born 17 September 1971) is an author, film producer, and film director, specializing in digital art. He has created a series of projects which investigate cinema's possible futures, including '' A Swarm of Angels'', '' onedotzero'' ...
, founder of the
onedotzero digital film festival. He has labelled the process Cinema 2.0. It would be the first time for a project of this scale to be funded, produced and distributed in this way.
Advisors to A Swarm of Angels include
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
author and copyright activist
Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow (; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog '' Boing Boing''. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of ...
,
graphic novel
A graphic novel is a long-form, fictional work of sequential art. The term ''graphic novel'' is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comic scholars and industry ...
ist
Warren Ellis
Warren Girard Ellis (born 16 February 1968) is a British comic book writer, novelist, and screenwriter. He is best known as the co-creator of several original comics series, including ''Transmetropolitan'' (1997–2002), ''Global Frequency'' ( ...
, pioneer
digital film producer
Tommy Pallotta, and musical
mashup artist Eric Kleptone of
The Kleptones
The Kleptones are a one-man English electronic music act fronted by music producer and DJ Eric Kleptone. They are best known for their Internet-exclusive mashup albums. Typically, Eric Kleptone mixes rock/R&B instrumentals with rap and hip-hop ...
.
Participation
A Swarm of Angels is recruiting a community capped at 50,000. Members can have a say in the script development. Two scripts are being developed, with one to be chosen by ASOA members to be produced. The scripts were being developed via the project forum and are entitled, ''The Unfold'', and ''The Ravages'' (formerly known as ''Glitch''). According to the official website, the first two ''A Swarm of Angels'' are "likely to be thriller based with soft sci-fi elements."
The project had its first voting day on 21 September 2006, where members were polled on certain decisions via their forum, The Nine Orders.
Recognition
The project won the R&D/Innovation category ''Britain's Digital Elite'' awards (sponsored by Real Business magazine and Microsoft) in October 2007.
The project was nominated for the May 2006 "Next Big Web Thing" award, which it subsequently won.
The Next Big Web Thing: A Swarm Of Angels
Challenges
After gaining big interest and participation levels during the first year in which the project was launched, development has slowed significantly in 2008.
In early 2009 the official webpage was taken offline to reset the project information for the next phase of production and collaboration. This was in direct response to criticism of the information density and the slow progress of the project, with subsequent difficulty in engagement for new users.
During the 3 years the website was online, about 1000 people registered as angels. The target of 50.000 is unlikely to be reached.
Project updates have been continuing via micro-blog updates. The Nine Orders forum appears to have been discontinued and has since been hijacked by malware promoters.
Additional sources
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References
External links
A Swarm of Angels web siteTwitter micro-blogging updatesCreative Commons Case Study
{{DEFAULTSORT:Swarm of Angels, A
Creative Commons-licensed films