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?