Press Pause Play: The Evolving Creative Landscape

From basement art to media glory, or why ones and zeros are the new chalk.

A few months ago, we raved about a new film about the change in production, consumption and distribution of creative works.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at Press Pause Play, the ambitious effort to dissect and document the evolution of today’s creative landscape.

A new generation of global creators and artists is emerging, equipped with other points of reference and other tools. The teachers aren’t certified schools anymore — it’s web sites, discussion forums and a “learn by doing”-mentality. We see the children of a digital age, unspoiled or uneducated depending on who you ask. Collaboration over hierarchy, digital over analog — a change in the way we produce, distribute and consume creative works.

The film comes from the team behind the 2020 Shaping Ideas Project and features interviews with an incredibly wide spectrum of creative visionaries, from the pop stars to the businessmen, the basement filmmakers to the studio heads.

Set to release in ealry 2011, Press Pause Play will embody the very principles it preaches — cross-platform distribution, a high-quality viewing experience both in theaters and on the mobile screen, and an open model that makes the final film free for anyone to watch, broadcast and distribute.

Catch interviews, quotes and behind-the-scenes footage on the PressPausePlay YouTube channel and take a look at some exculive production photos on Flickr.

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The Creators Project

Brazilian digital graffiti, Korean engineering and the evolution of modern art.

Brain Pickings is all about providing a platform of visibility for the projects, ideas and creators moving the world forward. Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) have the bandwidth that today’s media titans do. So we’re always happy to see said titans pull their media prowess together to give a share of voice to these creators. This month, two of them — VICE and Intel — are doing just that in a new partnership dubbed The Creators Project: A new network celebrating global creativity and culture across media.

From French hipster music darlings Phoenix to Brazilian digital artist Muti Randolph to South Korean engineer Hojun Song, the multiyear project showcases over 80 of the world’s most compelling creators, spanning an incredibly wide spectrum of creativity — art, design, fashion, gaming , film, music and more — which we think is tremendously important in an age when creative storytelling and self-expression continue to take new forms, explore new media and create new vocabulary for what it means to be an “artist.”

At a time in the history of the arts where digital technologies have revolutionized distribution, democratized access, and completely re-imagined the scope and scale with which an artist can create a vision and reach an audience, The Creators Project is a completely new kind of arts and culture channel for a completely new kind of world.

The project has two key missions: One, to continually identify visionary artists and offer a platform for celebrating their work; two, to serve as a content creation studio (they’ve already created a video for Phoenix), allowing artist to collaborate, facilitating the production and distribution of their work, and helping them reach new audiences both via the site itself and through the multiple events The Creators Project is holding around the world. The event series includes collections of curated artworks and installations, screenings, panel discussions and dozens of performances by the featured creators, beginning next month in New York City, then moving to London, Sao Paulo, and Seoul to finally culminate in Beijing with a massive three-day Creators exposition in September.

Co-created by DJ extraordinaire Mark Ronson, the project holds riveting promise for the intersection of creativity and technology. More importantly, it reclaims this future-forward conception of art from the grip of today’s fluff-lined manifestos and creates a tangible, actionable, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is platform for what is so often talked about and so rarely enacted.

You can follow The Creators Project on Twitter and show some love on Facebook. (While you’re at it, show some for us as well, eh?)

via Jawbone TV

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Crowdfunding for Creativity

Success via strangers, or what Transylvania has to do with an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis.

One of the most exciting things about the social web is its tendency to democratize the creative industry, allowing creators — artists, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, writers, entrepreneurs — to bypass the traditional industry distribution model and self-publish their creative output by crowdfunding it through platforms that connect them with their audience. Today, we look at three brilliant platforms for funding creative projects, plus a few more options specific to narrower creative fields.

KICKSTARTER

We’ve already featured Kickstarter extensively, but suffice it to say this brilliantly simple yet remarkably slick platform makes it as easy for creators to bring their visions to life by collecting pledges — promised donation amounts — from supporters. Creators set a donation period for each project posted for funding, then people begin pledging money, committing to donate the promised amount if the project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires. If it doesn’t, no money is collected at all and the pledges simply don’t materialize. If the project does get funded, Kickstarter only takes a 5% fee* and project owners keep 100% of creative ownership.

Kickstarter has funded anything from the brilliant 8-bit map of NYC, which we raved about on Twitter, to the The Obama Timecapsule project, which we featured in our curated gift guide to books last year, to a grassroots effort to save 10,000 Polyvinyl records from destruction, a project that resonated so much with the community that it was overfunded by 1563%, raising over $15,000 after an initial goal of just $1,000.

The only drawback: Kickstarter, still in Beta, is currently invite-only and requires a US bank account and mailing address. But we suspect the platform will open up significantly as it reaches Alpha.

ROCKETHUB

While we don’t generally support replica projects — which RocketHub seems to be of Kickstarter — this relative newcomer in grassroots crowdfunding does have a couple of advantages. Projects aren’t limited to the US — so long as you have a verified PayPal account, you can live anywhere and fuel your project with RocketHub. The platform is also open to anyone, no invitation needed.

But this extra liberty comes at a price — at 8%, RocketHub’s fee is significantly higher than Kickstarter’s, partly due to PayPal fees, which account for 3.5%.*

*Correction: Kickstarter charges a flat fee of 5%, but also passes along the Amazon Payments transactional fees (3%-5%) to the artists who use the platform, for a total fee anywhere between 8% and 10%. RocketHub charges a flat total fee of 8%. We apologize for the mix-up.

INDIE GOGO

Though limited to film only, IndieGoGo offers a promising platform for filmmakers, animators and web video entrepreneurs to fund their projects. The online social marketplace connect filmmakers and fans to make more independed film happen, giving filmmakers the necessary tools to make the elevator pitch for their porjects and allowing fans to contridubute directly to the films and causes they believe in.

IndieGogo is free to sign up and open to anyone. Unlike on Kickstarter, projects don’t have an expiration date and funding is ongoing until the goal is reached.

One of IndieGogo’s winning points is that it’s not US-only — it’s available in 90 countries and counting. And though it’s designed for film, anyone can use it — musicians, app developers, miscellaneous entrepreneurs.

The downside: It takes a 9% fee, almost double that of Kickstarter.

BONUS

Here are a few more options for funding projects in specific creative disciplines:

• Society6 matches visual artists — designers, painters, illustrators, photographers — with grant-givers. We interviewed founder Justin Wills about the platform last year, and have been delighted to see it blossom into something quite substantial.
• SellABand allows fans to microfund the recording and distribution of their favorite artists’ albums.
• Kopernik, which we featured last week, offers a microfunding platform for product design with a humanitarian focus.
• Spot.Us is a nonprofit experiment in communitiy-funded journalism, where freelance journalists can pitch story ideas and readers can pitch in money to bring them to life.
• Authonomy is an effort from publisher Harper Collins, using the wisdom of the crowd to spot — and sign — the next big bestseller.
• BuskerLabel, another crowdfunding venue for musicians.
• microPledge helps developers fund software projects.
• DonorsChoose offers microfunding for public schools by matching donors with specific classroom needs.

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The Transformative Power of Personal Projects

Time-stretching, self-funding, and why you should never underestimate grassroots creativity.

Today’s short-and-sweet is a reminder that personal projects done for passion, not profit, often take on a life of their own and end up resulting it creative and professional growth you could’ve never foreseen — take it from Ji Lee, Creative Director of Google Creative Labs, who masterminded the brilliant Bubble Project.

His talk at Behance’s 99% (one of our top 10 creative cross-disciplinary conferences) is a lovely testament to the transformative power of creative endeavors.

Instead of creating a project for myself, and just showing off, creating a project for other people to participate and collaborate instantly gains a sense of scale, and a sense of depth, and a sense of reach.

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