A Swarm Of Angels is a project to create a new kind of global entertainment community, acting as a type of participatory micro-studio. A Swarm of Angels remixes the traditional film production model to utilize an all-digital workflow and technologies to fund, make and distribute films primarily using the Internet. It is a collaborative network and process that borrows from Web 2.0 ideas and open source methodologies, refines the idea of crowdsourcing, and sustains itself through crowdfunding. By bringing these concepts together it is at the forefront of evolving a viable model to produce and distribute large scale free culture projects.
The feature film and related media created from A Swarm of Angels is free to download, share, and remix. Members from around the globe with a wide range of skills, interests, and backgrounds have joined a radical participatory online filmmaking community to do this: members join the Swarm by subscribing for UKP 25. This is the only restriction to becoming part of this network which is initially capped at 50,000. As part of the community, members get to vote on key decisions, develop script, concept, and visual materials via forum and wiki, to help make the film.
The community is its own audience and focus group, helping to shape a film around their own tastes and interests. As such it is a way to create more distinctive media for niche tastes, not needing to subscribe to commercial genres and appeal to a large multinational audience to recoup the production investment. Film has been constrained as an artform more than any other due to its capital intensive nature. A Swarm of Angels frees film from these shackles so it can be more experimental, more innovative, and more appealing to these niche audiences.
A Swarm of Angels is about creating the missing link between traditional film, and user-generated content. It is a beta for a new type of self-sustaining entertainment and production community. It has the ambition to be a flagship project toward creating a free culture entertainment ecosystem, that is peer-to-peer friendly, free of DRM, and a resource contributor for other creators.
Web address: http://www.aswarmofangels.com/
The high definition A Swarm of Angels motion graphics sting was created by Mark Hough.