Now this is participatory marketing (I'm playing with the term participatory media here) and customer evangelism.
This post from Download Aborted (via BoingBoing) suggests that ordinary PC desktop owners "help" with providing the raw processing power of their machines ala SETI@Home to offload the rendering of computer generated imagery in films like Shrek 2.
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing debunks the idea and offers a brilliant alternative as he notes the big expenses really go into the talent (animators and other 'creative class' workers) and marketing:
Ultimately, the largest expense in an Internet marketplace where anything is available always anywhere is marketing: the more choice, the more expensive influencing choice becomes.So a social SHREK@HOME could engage its audience not just for their cycles, but for their evangelism. We see glimmers of that in some machinima projects, like Red v Blue or in Flash-shorts like Homestar Runner, a clubbish sense of ownership by its fans that turn them into relentless marketers of the net-art.
The more engaged fans are with work, the purer the evangelism (hence the blogging bore and every other otaku [for fans, here's an obvious Purple Cow reference, see footnotes 1, 2 below] who can run on about her hobby forever). It's hard to be really engaged in the creative process of "shooting" CGI -- I don't know enough about 3D animation or visual art to second-guess those who do. But there are ways that even the unskilled can contribute.
Imagine a distributed renderer that included along the bottom thumbnails of alternate test-renders of the current sequence: different lighting, camera, even new inverse-kinematics and chaining. These different sequences could be created by the filmmaker and/or by more knowledgeable fans. While I render out the authoritative version, I can click on any of these little animated thumbnails and devote an equal number of cycles to rendering it, producing, in effect, an "audience cut" of the movie that can be matched with the foley and ADR in post to allow for different views on the same flick.
Much more in the post. Recommended reading to stimulate (i.e. it's not a formula, just a catalyst for) your own (unique) thoughts on engaging your fans.
[1] Otaku is a Japanese word that defines something that falls between an obsession and a hobby.
[2] "There's a Japanese word I'm borrowing here: otaku. An otaku is a person with an obsession. There are thousands of people who are hot sauce otaku. There are no mustard otaku. Krispy Kreme is another example. In Wichita, Kansas, a Krispy Kreme opened at 3 in the morning. Television stations broadcast simulcast. When you got there, you didn't just buy one, you bought two dozen. What do you do with two-dozen Krispy Kreme? You spread them around. You do the advertising for them. The product spreads." [Well, except low-carb diets are spreading faster now ;-) ]-- from Seth Godin's speech transcipt in Fast Company on The Purple Cow.
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