I’ve been thinking about how neat it would be to organize some sort of Internet choir, where the parts are all recorded separately by volunteers all over the world and then mixed into a final master… Or maybe even several versions, where the voices could be placed on a virtual stage and sone acoustic parameters could be applied to generate a particular performance. A giant Internet singalong as it were. Although something similar has been done with an orchestra I am unaware of anything employing vocals (and non professionals).Â
Another idea this led to was the idea of a collaborative documentary*, where the basic theme and scope would be laid out but then participants would shoot/record their own pieces to camera, cut scenes etc and then this would be assembled into something at least semi-coherent. Again, there have certainly been projects which have employed distributed sources but I don’t know that this has ever been taken beyond simply remote interviews. Part of the appeal of such a project would be in the unknown and unexpected insights of people free to simply interview themselves rather than simply answer questions thought up by the filmmaker. Only after sufficient material was gathered would the style and substance of the finished product emerge.
I would quite like to see such a composition on the subject of programming, something I have spent most of my life doing and yet still feel unable to effectively describe to a non-programmer. A regular documentary about programming is likely to follow historical arcs, talking to luminaries and founders, while failing to really say what it’s really all about, and comminicate what it is to be a programmer. I’d like to see a broad spectrum of people talk about what they love about the field, how they got started etc, without imposing a particular narrative from the outset. Such a documentary might be truly focused on the subject itself, rather than simple reminiscing about the early days and the pioneers.Â
* a search for “collaborative documentary” returns a bunch of hits, I’ll try watching a few and see if I still think it’s a good idea…