Crowdsourced Animation

Check out this great article in the New York Times today by Brooks Barnes entitled, An Animated Film is Created Through Internet Consensus. Here's a snippet:

Mass Animation is just one of several entertainment companies working the “crowdsourcing” angle. Perhaps the largest is Aniboom, which was founded in 2006 by the Israeli media mogul Uri Shinar and bills itself as a Web-based animation studio. Aniboom has built a global team of nearly 8,000 animators who have uploaded more than 13,000 clips into Aniboom’s library.

There is no doubt that animation and film is an area rip for innovation through crowdsourcing and co-creation. If you're not familiar with the mass animation project on Facebook here are the details of how the project ran:

In the end 57,000 people from 101 countries became “fans” of the Mass Animation page on Facebook and about 17,000 downloaded the software application, Mr. Landau said. The 51 winning animators hail from 17 countries, including Kazakhstan and Colombia. Eleven are women — the Hollywood animation mines are staffed almost entirely by men — and the group ranges in age from 14 to 48.

Kudos to my good friend Matt Jacobson from Facebook for putting this together. Matt get's the power of co-creation and mass collaboration and is sure to emerge as one of the leading voices in this paradigm shift. Likewise, Facebook is in a unique position to disrupt lots of traditional creative industries with it's community. There may be no need to form separate crowdsource communities such as crowdspring, 99 designs or even iStockphoto if Facebook can mobilize a large group of like-minded people in a certain direction to solve a problems from making animated shorts to supplying graphic design and photography.