Consumer generated media is very hot, but it isn’t new. The Beastie Boys did it already almost two years ago, when they handed out over 50 videocams to fans at a concert and told them to just shoot to their hearts content. The footage was edited and the resulting film, “Awesome, I Fucking Shot That!” is breakthrough.
From The New York Times:
New York punk rockers turned rappers turned caring hip-hop artists and family men, members of the Beastie Boys have more than most musicians used technology to involve fans in the creative process. They have been posting a capella songs on www.beastieboys.com, for instance, and inviting fans to use those building blocks for remixes of their own. [...]
Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”[...]
The longest cut in “Awesome” barely breaks a minute. Many shots clock in at less than a second. All told, the hour-and-a-half “Awesome” contains 6,732 edits. [...]
At Sundance the Beastie Boys will be the headliners at a party next week being given by MySpace, the social-networking Web site, to celebrate the debut of its filmmaker-community site. And MySpace will hold a contest urging its members to create a video of one of two Beastie Boys songs, “Sabotage” and “Shake Your Rump.”
Read more at the New York Times | via Ernie Schenck