Spike Lee Wants Your Help To Make a Movie
Shhh…the next episode is about to begin — and it’s directed by you. Or maybe just recorded, texted, or photographed.
Nokia Productions is asking Nokia handset owners to turn on their phone cams and start shooting on the theme of humanity. The goal is to collaborate on the world’s first social film, using text, photos, music and video footage. Eventually, all the user-generated content uploaded to www.nokiaproductions.com will be crafted into a masterpiece by none other than Emmy Award-winning director Spike Lee.
If getting your name in the credits on a Spike Lee film isn’t enough, Nokia is sweetening the deal with a new N95 and a trip to L.A. for the premier for one lucky contributor. The influential director (Malcolm X, Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever) calls this project “the democratization of film”.
“The future of film-making is changing and mobile-generated art is fast becoming the next medium for film. In five years, I believe we will be watching films in movie theaters that have been shot on a mobile phone,” says Lee. “Today, with state-of-the-art multimedia devices like what Nokia has to offer, you are seeing first-hand the democratization of film,” he says. “Aspiring filmmakers no longer have to go to film school to make great work. With a simple mobile phone, almost anyone can now become a filmmaker.”
For Nokia, the big question it’s asking, courtesy of this promotional project, is: “How will you collaborate?”. For the rest of us, it’s: “How will this not end up looking like crap?”.



[...] in May, I wrote about this project when it was calling for submissions (see The Democratization of Filmmaking). Earlier this week, Nokia premiered the results: [...]