Brooks Barnes
And the Oscar for the best animated short film goes to … an internet community? That teaser, posted last fall on Facebook by the upstart company Mass Animation, kicked off a project many people in Hollywood thought was laughable: making a five-minute animated film using the Wikipedia model, with animators from around the world contributing shots, and Facebook users voting on their favourites.
But it worked. The completed short, ?Live Music,? has been deemed of high enough quality by Sony Pictures Entertainment to warrant a theatrical run.
Sony will bring the tale of star-crossed love involving an electric guitar and a violin to the multiplex masses on Novomebr 20 as an opener for its animated feature ?Planet 51.?
?Social networks can operate like automated talent scouts, helping the cream rise more quickly to the top, and that?s what happened with ?Live Music,?? said Michael Lynton, chairman and chief executive of Sony?s entertainment division. ?While creativity has been pretty evenly distributed in society, it hasn?t always been easy to tap.?
Few expect ?Live Music? to win an Academy Award or even be nominated for one. But even Pixar started somewhere, and Sony?s enthusiasm for the short underscores the potential power of social networking in creating high-quality content.
The marketplace?advertising, gaming and, of course, Hollywood ?is hungry for content, animated in particular, that is done in a faster, cheaper way. ?Live Music? was made for about $1 million and took about six months to complete. Intel, hoping to peddle its new Core i7 processor to animation geeks, was the principal backer.
The finished film is made up of scenes submitted by 51 people, who received $500 per scene and a film credit for their efforts.
Mass Animation is just one of entertainment companies working the ?crowdsourcing? angle. Perhaps the largest is Aniboom, founded in 2006 by the Israeli media mogul Uri Shinar and bills itself as a Web-based animation studio. Aniboom has built a global team of nearly 8,000 animators who have uploaded more than 13,000 clips into Aniboom?s library. Aniboom is showing big potential, signing a flurry of deals in recent months.