Crowd Funded, Torrent Distributed Thriller Challenges Hollywood

Interested in being part of movie-making history? You can own a frame of a brand new movie for just $1 - and be part of an innovative crowdsourcing venture to boot. A film-making team in Sydney is harnessing the power of online crowds to first raise donations for production and then distribute their full-length horror movie via torrents. If successful, this could offer up a new formula for indie production companies to use to challenge the big Hollywood blockbusters. An investigation into a government cover-up leads to a network of abandoned train tunnels deep beneath the heart of Sydney. As a journalist and her crew hunt for the story it quickly becomes clear the story is hunting them. With a tag-line like this, The Tunnel looks like a classic, heart-pumping horror flick. And it might just instill fear in the many overpaid Hollywood execs out there. The two-man team at Distracted Media productions is hoping that their 135K Project - $135,000 being amount needed for full production - will be the first of many crowdsourced projects like The Tunnel. The Tunnel Facebook page and Twitter account are constantly updated with new media from the movie like the above movie poster, and the website has a tally of purchased frames, complete with the names of donors. But the truly counter-culture aspect of The Tunnel is not in its production: the film will be given away, for free, as a Torrent upon completion. Distracted Media writes on its website: After spending years being frustrated by what we saw as the movie industry's short-sighted and conventional outlook towards the online community, we decided it was time to try something different - The 135K Project was born...We believe that if we stop fighting the peer to peer networks, they could become the biggest revolution we have ever seen in the way we share entertainment and information. Torrent distribution runs completely against the grain of the current Hollywood attitude toward the peer-to-peer networks. Most studios try to squash Internet distribution, as giving away copies of a film - often still in theaters - is clearly detrimental to a studio's bottom line. But, if Distracted Media's model is successful, a brand new approach to movie distribution that works with, rather than against, online consumers could enter the mainstream. Distributing a movie for free online might not be the most intuitive way to make a profit, but it could start a grassroots movement that is based around free distribution, open access, and crowdsourcing rather than profit-maximizing. And the online community has, time after time, come together to support the causes they believe in. Perhaps The Tunnel will be the next one on the list. "The Tunnel" - Teaser 1 from thetunnelmovie on Vimeo.

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Crowd Funded, Torrent Distributed Thriller Challenges Hollywood

Lauren Dugan

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Lauren Dugan