I have a hard time getting around to all the websites I enjoy, admire, or appreciate. It had been a while, for instance, since I had dropped by Aaron’s page; he doesn’t update that often, so I don’t visit that often. I do keep him in my aggregator of choice, NetNewsWire, so when he updated yesterday I was interested to read about a project he commended to our attention: the film Nothing So Strange, about which I’d heard nothing before.
OK, the project grabs my attention by depicting the assassination of Bill Gates in December, 1999.
More than that, though, the producer (a blogger!) released digital versions of the film online in two versions, a smaller (shorter download, less expensive) and a larger (longer download, more expensive) digital version, covered by Creative Commons license declared the footage itself Open Source (encouraging anyone else to remix their footage!), and available via BitPass (best known as a micropayments broker — at 3 and 5 dollars, this is more of a macropayment, but the principle is the same).
So: fact/fiction/narrative/visual hermeneutics problems, independent production, aware of the possibilities of online distribution, Creative Commons/Open Source principles, micropayments: what’s not to fascinate?
The producers might easily have elicited all my political sympathies while still making a superficial, amateurish, disappointing movie — but Nothing So Strange succeeds across the board. The digital version I bought (the larger version) had some digital artifacts or pixellation problems with rapid action onscreen, but that’s the closest I come to a complaint about the whole endeavor (well, that and I don’t like Lydian Roman, the typeface they use for the whole production). The filmmakers produced a tightly-plotted “documentary” with recognizable, multi-dimensional characters; they achieved a convincing imitation of journalistic style; and both the filmed narrative and the gesture of producing such a film raise terrific questions about truth-telling and representation.
The filmmakers earn our support just by attempting such a project. Their accomplishment practically demands attention from people who like movies, who think about online media, who wonder about truth and narrative, who believe in micropayments, who advocate fundamental changes in the ways creators interact with their audiences, who question archaic copyright restrictions. Thank you, Aaron, for noticing and flagging this; Bravo, Nothing So Strange! Buy it, watch it, remix it!
Posted by AKMA at December 26, 2003 12:09 PM | TrackBack