At the Futures of Entertainment 5 conference next week on MIT's campus, we'll be featuring a panel entitled "Creating with the Crowd: Crowdsourcing for Funding, Producing and Circulating Media Content." (A few tickets are still available here.), The panel will be moderated by FoE Fellow and Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile Ana Domb and will feature academics and media industries innovators from Brazil, Finland, The Netherlands, and the U.S. Recently, Ana had a chance to catch up with one of the panelists, Bruno Natal of Queremos:
Ana: Bruno, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and your interests.
Bruno: I'm going to Futures of Entertainment representing a group of six people. I'm a documentarian and music writer. Tiago Lins is a video photographer with a degree in economy. Pedro Seiler is a cultural promoter. Felipe Continentino is a TV director. Pedro Garcia works in advertising. And Lucas Bori is a still photographer. Besides making films such as Dub Echoes, I have a weekly column at Rio's newspaper O Globo and blog at URBe. I am also one of the founders and editor of the portal OEsquema.
Ana: What are you working on now?
Bruno: Right now, Queremos and its growth has been taking up much of my time, but I still write and blog. This year, I managed to make one doc about Brazilian music legend Chico Buarque's latest recording. It was actually an online project, called "Chico: Bastidores", through which we released many video "pills" before the record came out, with exclusive content to those who pre-bought it, including the documentary. Since the album release, all content is open, so anyone can enjoy it. The idea was to boost the pre-sale and increase the presence of the artist's work in the media (a whole month, instead of just everything coming out on the release date), and it did quite well in both cases.
Ana: What do you think crowdsourcing (as funding, distributing or any other form) contributes to the current media landscape and how do you think it could help shape its futures?
Bruno: I think it means that there are less people in between fans and artists, in a broad sense, and a lot of things can come from that. With less filters, there is also less noise in the communication, so both ends can get their ideas through with much more effect. More importantly, by getting involved in the process from such a early stage, fans also get a better idea of how the industry works, and this can be beneficial on many levels. For instance, in our case, fans now have a much better understanding of the value of a ticket and why it is important to pay for it (Rio has a true "VIP guest list" problem.) in order to keep things happening. Having said that, the main change is probably in transparency. Things are becoming much clearer nowadays, in everything. Also, as we can see by the amount of revolutions going on nowadays, from Iran to #occupywallstreet, people learned they could get together online with some ease. Now, they are using this power to transform society, on all levels. This is just the beginning.
