Spain: Wikimovie, created through online participation

In Spain, beverage company Mahou has decided to climb on the online participation bandwagon and have turned to the internet to create and produce a short film where directing, casting and production decisions have been made by the community of participants at the WikiPeli site. With close to 3000 users, voting has been the democratic way in which decisions have been made, and a couple of famous Spanish directors, José Corbacho and Juan Cruz have been in charge of putting into operation the community's decisions.

On the Wikipeli youtube channel they've been posting step by step updates of how the film is coming along. This next video shows the main directors apologizing for not being able to find a gray limo for the shooting. The color was decided by the winner on a local radio show. They couldn´t find a gray limo, and it would be really expensive to paint it, so they had to go with white, however they justified themselves by stating that since the limo was where a bride would be transported, white is not completely inappropriate.

This is the general dynamic for decisions made during the WikiPeli production: for example, when they needed a male actor to be “devoured”, they received many entries, and with audience voting, they finally selected Abel:

Here you can see the other competing casting videos for the male actor:

They have also counted on participant's suggestions and submissions to select the soundtrack:

Currently, they have finished filming and are currently editing the movie, and on the last post on their blog they explain the difference that special effects make in movies:

Para ilustrar esto que os digo, os dejo un vídeo de un momento del rodaje, para que veáis el papel de los efectos especiales, que formarán parte de una de las escenas más impactantes. Os queremos mostrar cómo se lo montaron los especialistas para que, en una puerta metálica, apareciera una terrorífica figura humana, con la consiguiente reacción de pánico de Martín Rivas, nuestro Álex.

To illustrate this, I give you a video of a moment during filming, so you can see the role special effects have on one of the most shocking scenes. We want to show how the special effects were set so that in a metal door, a terrifying human figure shows through, and the following panicked reaction which Martín Rivas, our Alex, has.

At the moment, they are in the process of selecting the name the movie will have, which were narrowed down to three from all the others the participants (called co-directors) sent in.