The process of making a film is in some ways inherently collaborative, you can’t really do it on your own. thinkpublic is all about collaboration and we’ve tried to take this element to the extreme; helping everyone from people with dementia to children make films about their own experiences. It involves lots of people planning, carrying, talking, plotting, presenting, filming, waving, sound recording, shouting, laughing and working towards the same product.
There’s one element of the process that’s not quite there yet in terms of collaboration - editing. Though we’ve occasionally taken laptops out to people’s homes to edit film with them its not a particularly efficient process - editing still tends to be us locking ourselves in a dark room and deciding what people should see.
Now seems like a good time to experiment with a collaborative editing process: Following in the footsteps Jamie King’s “Steal This Film”, I put the rushes (the unedited footage) of my film Us Now online for people to do what they want with. The BBC’s Virtual Revolution has now followed suit and became the first BBC documentary to do so.
It seems that there is a wealth of wonderful footage out there and many new films could be made without a traditional production editing process. What would this process look like? Should we give it a go?