Wikipeli, the first 2.0 experience of Spanish cinema, has just finished filming. The project relies on more than two thousand people contributing their ideas to the web project. Its users are fully involved  and they have voice and vote in all aspects of production. Contributing and voting on ideas is how this project is becoming a reality that I look forward to seeing.

Of course, as an audiovisual experiment, this initiative is very interesting and I can see what a nightmare it had to be for the organisation to find common ground in this hotch potch of different ideas.  Besides, we can classify this initiative as part of a trend  on behalf of Spanish cinema which is trying to recover the popularity of shorts, not just as a perfect learning process for new producers, but as a promotion of the Spanish  film industry.  We can see this tendency commercially developed Pedro Almodóvar’s last short :  The cannibalistic town councillor.

This is not the first time an audiovisual production has been altered thanks to internet users.  Snakes on a plane with Samuel L. Jackson changed its screenplay to follow internet users’ suggestions.

The author Paulo Coelho started a similar 52 minute project in which internet users could make suggestions at the production stage. I’m talking about the film adaptation of The witch of Portobello, in which the story itself invites public participation.

At the moment everybody is looking for innovation in a sector that has been in deep crisis for some time and this could be a way to implicate the viewers in what they’re watching. And maybe, just maybe, this could lead to crowded cinemas once again…

The Experimental Witch Film Competition Trailer

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