Cinema 2.0 project in Turin

“Open source cinema launched in Turin” is the headline of an article in the Nova24 supplement of Italy’s newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, published on 25 January 2007. Here is a quick (and rough) translation.

Turin is setting up a second-generation type of cinema. It is written, created and distributed by a community of film lovers. The project is called CineTma (www.cinetma.org) and is about to be launched by Finpiemonte and the Piedmont Region as part of its broader “Creativity Platform”.

This initiative bets on a new and sustainable development for the movie industry: to make a feature movie where script, casting, soundtrack, investment and distribution result from the collaboration of many movie lovers, who can taken possession again of the cinema product by investing their creativity in an interactive web platform.

Also the editing process can now be done in streaming, thanks to a new open-source technology developed by the Polytechnic University of Turin. It allows various editors to work simultaneously on the same material online. […]

This of course means that the very concept of creating something needs to be redefined.

And this is what the people behind the CineTma project are doing, inspired by the pioneering experience of “A Swarm of Angels,” which gave birth to the movement of “Cinema 2.0.” The connection with the Web 2.0 model is obvious: it offers the consumers of a creative product the possibility of also interacting with it: by completing it, improving it, or creating new products with the original one as the basis. […]

In the case of Cinema 2.0, the process is not limited to the co-creation of online contents, but also includes offline activities that use human and material resources, which are of course relatively expensive on the market, to shoot the actual feature movie. As opposed to what happens in traditional movie production, the participants in the CineTma project are also its financiers, each one of them investing a small sum somma (about 35 euro). Multiplied by all those who invest in the movie, this can help assure the full movie budget, which is rarely less than 600,000 euro.

The article (available in Italian via Cotec) was written by Irene Cassarino who works on user-driven innovation policy for Finpiemonte, the agency supporting research and innovation projects in Piedmont.