The below is excerpted from an email I sent to some friends at an unnamed tech company, regarding my documentary This is Fi. I think this would actually work as a way to crowdsource documentary film logging and transcription – allowing people to donate labor instead of cash.

The Problem:

* We have over 100+ hours of footage (video diaries) of a man who speaks accented English.

* The first step in turning those 100+ hours into a 90-minute movie and a rich media website is transcribing and logging the footage.

* The cheapest cost I’ve found for this task is $50/hour of footage by an Indian offshoring company called REDACTED. This would mean a minimum of $5000 to get started on the movie.

* If we don’t hire it out, we’re looking at 400-600 man hours of doing the logging/transcription ourselves.

We were just granted non-profit sponsorship for our doc… Which means that my partner and I are about to go beat the bushes for $5K in donations just to transcribe the film. Ouch!

Buy what if we weren’t asking for cash? What if we could ask – even our brokest friends – for a donation of time and boredom.

Proposed Solution:

* What if we broke our hundred hours of footage into manageable sizes (15 seconds) and crowd-sourced the transcription. (Like Aaron Koblin’s work with Mechanical Turk.)

* The structure would be the video version of the recaptcha project – people’s transcription would be checked against other transcriptions… Sometimes a user would be providing a first pass, often they’d be validating.

* “Donations” of transcription would be charted against the goal (think “Kickstarter”). People would be able to see the impact they’d had on the process.

Why this matters:

* Distributed logging could be a significant cost-cutter not only for doc projects, but for corporate video/reality shows/etc. It’s a way to aggregate the time of interns/support staff/even audience members into meaningful work without wasting resources on managing volunteers.

* Metadata collected here could be an early part of the feedback loop – just by adding opinion information to the logging data… For example: what did you see? How compelling was it on a scale of 1 to 5?

* Even if not using volunteers – paying micropayments of 10 cents per 15 seconds would be a drastic reduction in cost over conventional logging. Paying by the second could bring a huge savings to production co’s IF there was some way to track the data from the original source footage, to the review area, and back.

The question:

* Is this possible?

* What are the stumbling blocks of breaking-down and reconstituting the footage and associated metadata? Can editing software talk to the net?

* Do you know of a solution that does this already? This is probably ridiculous – but could you batch-upload to YouTube and then scrape YouTube comments for logging info?

What do YOU think? None of us have money to donate to a film… What about time? A little effort? What if it was a game? Would you compete against friends? Would this be more/less boring than minesweeper/solitaire?

As always, would love to hear what you think, whoever you are.

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First-person documentary is a bit of an obsession of mine. I’m making a documentary on my friend, Fi, and 90% of the footage is stuff he shot. His self-filmed DV is far more interesting, raw, and compelling than our “professionally filmed” HD.

The challenge to this methodology is editorially – how do you filter hundreds of hours of video diaries? How do you sculpt a journal into a narrative?

This problem is the same problem that keeps people from cutting home movies into anything self-contained. Editorial is time-consuming, tedious and requires a custom skill set. But, what if you could take the judgments that are behind editorial decisions and automate them? What if you could use thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting and/or tagging to allow people to shape an edit? What if you used social networking behavior to allow an automated edit to know that John is more interested in footage pertaining to his friend Sam and his girlfriend Kate than he is in his acquaintance Mike?

I proposed a system of mobile devices that recognize proximity, social relationships and shoot high-quality video. Picture this: you go to a party with a bunch of friends. All of you film with your smart, high-quality cameraphones. At night, while you sleep, the phones upload footage and create an assembly based on the order in which things happened and physical proximity (i.e. the phone knows if two people were filming the same conversation, dance, striptease, etc). When you wake up in the morning, you watch a video. You click a thumbs up for shots you like, a thumbs down for shots you don’t, and you tag people you recognize. When your friend watches the video 2 hours later, the choices you made about the video have further refined the edit. He, too, makes decisions. Each re-viewing of the video produces a more finished version.

If you and your friends did this all the time, you’d end up with an on-going series about your lives – particularly the events when cameras are most present: concerts, parties, weddings, graduations, sports events, road trips, etc.

I worked with my friends Tony and Sooyoung at Favorite Medium on this deck. Nokia didn’t go for it, but I still believe in the idea. Someone should do this. If you think it’s a good idea, call me.

A PDF is here.

His car was a thirty-five year old Mercedes coupe: burgundy. The original sheen had been buffed by age into a uniform matte, varnish evaporating to leave the car with a muddy, mineral coat. The trim, knife-edged rails and protrusions running the length of the car and tapering into the wedged front bumper, had undergone a similar alchemy in the Texas sun. By process of slow baking, the chromed steel cracked along stress lines, revealing a variegated core.

Inside the coupe, the cockpit of state-of-the art features had failed in a slow series. The gas tank was forever 199 miles to empty. The check engine light could not be reset. The external thermometer made random guesses at the weather, always fifteen degrees high or low. Twenty years of dropping ass-first into the car, first from the height of his cane, but more recently from the lower height of his rolling walker, flattened the springs of the driver’s seat and crumbled the foam. The abuse pounded four inches from the height of the seat, which he’d restored with an inflatable hemorrhoid pillow.

He did not keep the coupe sentimentally. Its aging and deterioration were not a romantic counterpoint to his. He charted the cost of repair of the car annually on a sheet of graph paper against the cost of acquiring a new Mercedes coupe and every year, made a calculated decision that the cosmetic deterioration and the loss of secondary features were acceptable against the rising cost of the contemporary version of the car, even when adjusted for inflation.

The car was fast, and he liked that. It handled tautly. He could feel the machine-ness of the car and the road-ness of the road.

While she was alive, he had hated her car: a white 2004 Buick LaSabre, as generic as his coupe was particular. It was sluggish. It started, stopped and turned with flabby, gelatin imprecision. All he would concede to her was power of the air conditioner. She had selected the LaSabre because she thought, with its upright rear windshield and its front bench seats, that it resembled a Cadillac. She had always wanted a Cadillac, but would not squander money on something so lavish.

The white Buick parked next to the burgundy Mercedes in the garage.

When she died, the first sensation to overtake him was not sadness, but exhaustion. He had been meticulous in all things. He breakfasted on individually washed and sliced berries. Preparing the fruit was a ritual that he spent over an hour on each day. He was an avid letter-writer and few mistakes of the homeowner’s association, the Exxon pension plan or the local PBS affiliate were too small to merit a missive, first written long form and then typed, as he played the role of his own secretary. These, and a thousand similar efforts became impossibly difficult in the vacuum she left. For the first time in a long time, he felt lazy.

Breakfast went from berries to packaged smoked salmon on toast. Each day gained an hour. Commercial relations with banks, magazines, and catalogue companies were severed because he could not fulfill the social obligation to provide feedback on the quality of their products and customer service. After wrestling to squeeze his walker into the trunk of the coupe, eighteen days after her memorial service, he noticed and could not un-notice the size of the Buick’s trunk.

The commitment to his car lingered longer than many of the other ways of doing him that for so long had defined him, or at least expressed his ethic. It started first as transportation only to doctor’s appointments. The walks through the hospital were long, and often all the handicapped parking spaces were taken. Conserving his energy for these walks was a worthy enough cause. As oversized as the car was, it was convenient. It had twice the electrical amenities of the Mercedes. The seat would rise to allow him to slide into the car without making the undignified ass-first flop he took into his own car. The steering wheel lifted over his legs as he swung them in. He hit a button on his keys, marked “#2” and the seat and mirrors slid in concert to place him at the perfect height and comfort.

This small, automatic customization was enough to seduce him. Trips to the grocery store were soon made in the Buick, followed by trips to the pool supply store to buy 10-gallon buckets of granulated chlorine. The trunk opened itself. The windshield wipers turned on and off when they sensed or did not sense rain.

His trip to visit their probate attorney was the last errand he ran in the coupe. The fight with the trunk, the stiffness of the wheel: these mild exertions had once been the personality of the car (particular, almost fussy, demanding). Sweating through a shirt he would have preferred not to sweat through, his sciatica making it impossible to find a tolerable position to sit in, he was now unable to perceive the car’s peculiarities as a personality. They were unnecessary effort at a time when his necessary effort overwhelmed him. He defused his agitation by promising himself to sell the Mercedes.

He did not sell the Mercedes. It sat unused in his garage. When his sons and grandsons visited, he lent it to them, almost forgetting his frustration. He would hand them the keys with a grin, a huge grin if he knew they were seeing a woman, because this was after all a sports car and women were impressed by sports cars. Although the workings of their social lives were obscured by generational distance and polite vagueness in deference to his age, he was certain that the loan helped them in their pursuits.

It was during one of these visits that he lost his keys to the Buick. A grandson, an only child who did worse than his cousins in work and school but seemed to fare the best if only by virtue of his smile and general sense of ease, took the Mercedes and an attractive red-headed marketing director on a camping trip. The Buick keys traveled with them on the Mercedes keychain.

Searching for the lost key or a replacement turned up an “emergency key” at the bottom of a kitchen drawer. He attempted to use it to start the Buick, but succeeded only in setting off the alarm, which sounded for five minutes before deactivating itself. The embarrassment and frustration of the incident discouraged him. He gave up on errands for the day, opting to distract himself from the passing hours with a series of short naps punctuated with television. He found nothing to watch, and though he’d expended no energy since the search for the key, it was easy to allow the day’s inertia to carry him to bed.

He awoke hungry and with a general unease. His leg ached. His lower left back cramped with a nagging knot that prevented him from straightening. He rummaged through the refrigerator but found nothing that appealed to him. All that seemed appetizing was eggs. He was certain that a real breakfast would cure his grim mood and looked forward to the attention of a meal that required a host and a waitress. But first, he would have to find keys.

After making a wreck of his desk and the kitchen drawers, it occurred to him that he’d placed a small cardboard box of her personal effects in one of his study cabinets. Her key was in it, beneath the contents of her last purse. There was a credit card of his, as well. He’d thought it was lost and had gone to great trouble to find the toll-free number to cancel it. An irritation he hadn’t felt since her death returned and was comfortingly familiar.

He sat in the Buick, pressing the button that adjusted the seats and mirrors. But, it was her keychain, and they were her settings. The seat’s motor pushed him towards the ceiling. The back of the seat collapsed into the front, to accommodate the stoop of osteoporosis that had affected her in her last twenty years. The mirrors pivoted to impossible angles and the wheel rose up to the position that permitted her to peek through the gap between its edge and the rim of the dashboard. He was slower than the metamorphosis of the car and as the cockpit reshaped itself, his large frame was pressed into the shape of her small form. He felt her body in all the ways his own did not fit: her lithe arms, her height, the birdlike grace of her ribs. The ghost of her shape had been saved as setting #1 in the Buick’s remote. Pressed into it, he felt her embrace.