Form in Motion: An interview with filmmaker Matt Hanson

Before Matt Hanson, the intersection of film and graphic design occurred primarily in movie title sequences—those short visual jags of color, type, and motion that at the very least served to introduce the viewing public to the cast and crew of a film, and at the very best set the mood and style of the story that follows. Hanson's vision was that designers—with the help of digital technology—could move beyond just introducing the work of other artists and create films of their own. In 1996, he founded the first—and to date most influential—festival of digital filmmaking, onedotzero, which convenes at London's Institute of Contemporary Art each year.

After five years of commissioning and producing the festival, he left onedotzero to pursue his own film work and to write what became several books about the topic: The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age (Rotovision, 2004), Motion Blur: Graphic Moving Imagemakers (Collins Design, 2004), Building Sci-Fi Moviescapes: The Science Behind the Fiction (Focal Press, 2005), and Reinventing Music Video: Next-Generation Directors, Their Inspiration and Work (Focal Press, 2006).

Now, Hanson is in the process of redefining not just how films are made, but how they are financed. The emergence of networked technologies, the phenomenon of crowdsourcing, and his own frustration with the unwieldy and often prohibitive mechanisms of film finance led Hanson to conceive of a new way of filmmaking that has come to be called “A Swarm of Angels.” The goal: raise £1 million via a limited and self-selecting community of 50,000 online film enthusiasts and make a feature film in one year.

Andrea Codrington spoke to Hanson from his studio in Brighton, England, about digital design, the power of crowds, and toppling the traditional filmmaking hierarchy.

Figure1: Images from City of Hollow Mountains, a short film by The Light Surgeons, produced by Hanson.

How did you first get involved in digital film and video?

I grew up in Yorkshire, miles away from London culturally and geographically. When I moved to London, I used to take Fridays off during college to go and watch movies, and then started writing film reviews for magazines like the Face and Dazed and Confused. I also started to get into web stuff. In the early 1990s, there were very few people innovating in this area. I was the first person I knew with an e-mail address, which was of no use really. I used a 14.4 modem and Mosaic as a browser.

What do you think got you so interested early on in digital and interactive technology? Did you have any expectation of what it would lead to?

It came as an organic outgrowth of my passion for film and my blossoming interest in the Internet. I love the mutability of digital, the way you can play around and tweak it. It was—and still is—an inchoate field, so I thought I could make a mark in the area and hopefully influence things. I generally think on a very conceptual level, but when I got interested in this fledgling area I just had an intuitive grasp of it and the possibilities. So culturally I definitely wanted to make a difference, and personally I wanted to carve out my own direction in film and not emulate past paths. Sometimes I think I’ve been wildly successful, and other times things have failed. But if you never fail you are not experimenting enough. And these things can end up succeeding in another form. For example, I recycled some of the ideas I couldn’t realize at the time into the text of my book The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age.

It seemed like a natural thing to want to bring film and the Internet together, but at the time films online were postage-stamp sized. I did work for Blender—a CD-ROM magazine—in New York, using hypertext interviews with text leading off to all kinds of different media. I loved that kind of slipping between different media, but it wasn’t quite ready then.

Figure 2: Hanson served as the creative producer on the award-winning film Salaryman 6 by Jake Knight, which was commissioned for onedotzero.

Tell me more about “slipping between media.”

I think most people are horizontally integrated: they have certain skills they are good at and tend to move between industries (whether creative or otherwise) applying their skills. I’m more vertically integrated, so I’ll write, direct, and produce within digital film, as well as comment and conceptualize within the same arena. I’ve produced interactive work, films, installations, VJ events, and books all around the edges of moving image.

More and more people are becoming vertically integrated. That has a lot to do with the expansion in cultural production. Do you specialize in skills or an area? It feels really natural to slip between media and creative disciplines. Artists have always done it, but it’s now more acceptable. That has to do with digital media; the toolsets allow you to move between media more naturally.

The film festival you founded, onedotzero, not only celebrated digital filmmaking, it helped to invent and define it. How did onedotzero get started?

I got frustrated with the editing process of magazines and decided to set up a festival of digital films. At the time in London there was a lot of electricity in the air surrounding new media groups like Tomato. It was predawn in the world of design and motion graphics. Since there was not enough digital work for onedotzero to be a showcase festival, I decided that it should be presented as a production festival, which means that I went around and commissioned work to be a part of it. In those early days I approached people I thought would do interesting things and edged them into motion. I didn’t really know any of the designers I called on, but they were very receptive to my ideas. I wanted to focus on the stylistic angle and get away from the formulated narratives so common in film, and the designers really responded to that.

What were the kinds of issues you were asking participants to explore, and why did it matter that they did so using digital technology?

It was essential that things be digital. I looked at programming a film festival from a conceptual mindset rather than a thematic standpoint. So at first it was about creating that bricolage, using digital tech as an enabler to join different sources together. I also wanted to repurpose visuals designed for the small screen onto the big screen, so I think it was the first time Flash—called Futuresplash at the time—was used and projected onto a cinema screen.

As far as commissioning, one year, for example, I curated and commissioned from a videogaming standpoint. I wanted graphic filmmakers to embrace the aesthetics of computer gaming in their work. I liked that tension, showing such vibrant, young, and wayward media in the context of a contemporary arts institution (all the programming was first screened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London). Contemporary art wasn’t engaging with that area at all during that period. Film is only just starting to (despite the proliferation of video game “adaptations”). Interestingly, the first major filmmaker who attended onedotzero was Terry Gilliam, who of course started out in animation. There were no other traditional filmmakers involved at that time.

You make a pretty strong distinction between traditional film and digital work, but I’m not sure I understand the importance of the medium in shaping the end result.

I guess it’s all to do with how much money it costs to make a film—the means of production. The cheaper the means of production, the more creative you can be.

Figure 3: Image from All Points Between, a live VJ film/event by The Light Surgeons, which Hanson helped conceive and produce.

What’s the difference between how a digital designer approaches a film project and the way a traditional filmmaker approaches it?

Really simply, a designer approaches it from a visual standpoint, a filmmaker from a narrative one. One can learn from the other. Especially in the UK, we have suffered from too literary a tradition subsuming cinema to its will. It hasn’t been visual enough. I also saw a freshness in design that I thought could shake up the grammar of film. Filmmaking has never been very promiscuous, reaching across to other disciplines. It is difficult to get the two worlds to meet. I still think people don’t jump between those disciplines very well, although this new generation of video directors are starting to. MoGraph has to a certain extent done that now with younger moving-image genres, and is nibbling around the edges of film. You can definitely see it influencing certain filmmakers. I noticed it in A Bittersweet Life by Kim Jee-Woon, and the graphic and video gaming influence of the Double Dragon side scrolling of Chan-wook Park’s OldBoy. I’m quite into Korean cinema at the moment—it’s so vibrant, like Japanese cinema in the late 1990s.

Music video is an example of where the visual can be meshed with the narrative—and where avant-garde meets the mainstream. At the beginning, I was quite against music videos because they were usually so constrained by both commissioners and broadcasters. Of course there have been examples of video directors who have crossed over into feature films quite easily. I think Spike Jonze’s work is the easiest to assimilate into the Hollywood structure; it slots stylistically into film. And Michel Gondry is just genius. He’s a magical realist in both video and film. But there are many video directors who have styles that don’t necessarily fit easily into a narrative context. Some music video directors just give a different feeling to narrative. Jonathan Glazer is a good example. Since Glazer comes out of the advertising world where he always worked with a good copywriter, it remains to be seen whether he can pull off a longer narrative himself.

Why do you think that digital designers and music video directors have a more challenging time dealing with narrative?

It’s easier to get lost in manipulating and creating the visuals in digital film. It’s more malleable so it is obviously easier to produce nonnarrative work. I’d also suggest that filmmakers with a more graphic mindset have generally not been in a position to create the right framework to finance and make feature films comfortably. And yes, they are generally not such strong writers. There’s a translation problem between the disciplines.

Talk more about how digital technology changed the nature of film and video and particularly how it has changed what we expect from a story.

I think filmmakers have only just touched the surface. To a certain extent, one is always constrained in terms of how far you can push the envelope because the trick is to propel people—the audience—along with you. That’s why all the interesting stuff always happens on the margins.

Digital technology has exploded narratives—they are more malleable, slippery, unformed. They are often imperfect. And I love this: flaws, asymmetry. I think we—and the next generation—are really embracing the idea that “perfectly formed” media as lacking in personality. So for example that’s why I prefer the science fiction work of Oshii Mamoru, who directed the Ghost in the Shell films, or something like Casshern from Japanese music video alumni Kiriya Kazuaki.

You can see this acceleration toward exploded narratives in terms of the way digital editing has made that area increasingly sophisticated—with more intercutting and edits. I’m not just talking about everything getting faster!

Figure 4: Image from Thumbnail Express, by The Light Surgeons, produced by Hanson. One of the “expressionistic documentary” short films spinning out of the live VJ events.

How has the visual language of video games been incorporated into films?

I’ve always been a fan of the “floating rectangle”—the camera frame that explores the area Paul Schrader always used to talk about—and a classic film exemplar of that is Bernardo Bertolucci. The camera in The Conformist casts its gaze luxuriously around that world. If you look at contemporary filmmakers like David Fincher or Krzysztof Kieslowski, though, that gaze is unfettered. So the camera is a participant and protagonist now. And I think that has come through from videogaming. All these factors—the added spatial dimension, narrative fragmentation, and the floating context—come from our familiarity with the interactive arena. Whether that means console gaming, online worlds, or interactive installations and devices.

Figure 5: An image from Tekkon Kinkreet by Koji Morimoto: an anime film featured in Hanson’s book The End of Celluloid.

When did you realize that you were really on to something? That the kind of work you were exploring would have industry-wide implications?

The third year of onedotzero, when designers and directors started submitting digital work they had done, people started to see something tangible. All of a sudden industry turned to it, the technology grew, and onedotzero hothoused a lot of talent—studios like Fuel and Shynola, which hadn’t done a single music video yet. When this started happening, companies like Playstation started getting involved in sponsorship. It became a year-round, global festival. We started firing off capsule festivals—seven-day plus events in such places as Berlin and Taipei. If you’re trying to invent the future, people can’t necessarily see what you see, so you have to show them something tangible so they will want to go with you.

How would you describe your vision of the future back then?

It sounds quite grandiose, but I wanted to inform and test a model for a cinema infused with more contemporary energy—to basically update the medium. Cinematic language actually changes pretty slowly due to the historically massive costs of creating it. So onedotzero was all about creating a framework for experimentation, changing the creative process. I even started commissioning live digital events.

How would you describe such an event?

The new media performances happened right from the start. But they became more sophisticated with each edition. It felt like a defining moment creating what I conceptualized as a “live expressionistic documentary” with VJ supergroup The Light Surgeons. Just giving them the framework to move their visual work into a more narrative area felt very satisfying as a creative producer. They definitely stepped up to the plate with Electronic Manoeuvres and the follow up, APB: All Points Between, which were about using live events to move a narrative film from roughcut to fine cut using performances on an international tour.

Figure 6: Images from the transvision event. onedotzero 2006.

Why did you decide to leave onedotzero at the end of 2001?

The templates were pretty much set after five years, so it was a good time to move on. My main interest is not as an events organizer, so in the second year of the festival I brought in a producer named Shane Walter, who codirected the programs for a number of years. I wanted to go away and think about how you could now integrate this experimentation with “mainstream” narrative cinema. I knew that Shane could take over, and he’s still the festival director. I hadn’t done any writing during my time producing onedotzero, and I really wanted to put my thoughts on paper. So I spent my time putting into writing the spectrum of moving images that I had experienced over the past decade. The result was my book The End of Celluloid. I also wanted to reengage with film as most people knew it.

Figure 7: Poster for the Swarm of Angels project.

So now you are not only redefining film and narrative, you are redefining the way films are made. Tell us about A Swarm of Angels.

Some of the directing projects I had wanted to pursue didn’t happen but transmuted into a particular idea that I started conceiving for the web. I wanted to marry my thoughts on digital film with the environment of Web 2.0 to create and distribute a feature film. Feature films are such behemoths and based on old-fashioned business models. Rather than seeking out venture capital roots and studio money, I thought why not bypass the feature financing arena altogether and conceive a really agile model based on communities of people? A Swarm of Angels not only presents a vastly different business model, but is also based on the Web 2.0 community and the idea of the remixability and mutability of new media.

My primary motivation for wanting to direct a feature in this way was to have the creative control to marry the younger moving image forms taken from music video, gaming, MoGraph, and VJing with the traditional feature-film form. My philosophy for promotion is now based on creating echoes from trusted voices (propagated by online communication), rather than tapping traditional offline media.

Figure 8: Swarm of Angels invitation, 2006.

How do you think crowdsourcing is going to come into play in the development of A Swarm of Angels? Will it have an impact on the content and production of filmmaking down the line?

I think I’ll be able to fill most key positions in the film from the global community we are generating who are supporting and, with their subscription, financing the film. So this crowdsourcing is one aspect of a the Swarming Angels creative model I’m trying to evolve with these members. It is bringing a whole new dimension to creative production. Film has always been a collaborative medium, so crowdsourcing is a great fit with it. It actually strengthens the normal filmmaking process. I have already had amazing input on the two scripts that are being developed as candidates for producing this £1 million feature. So when the Swarm is larger I suspect and hope we’re going to have an amazingly vibrant remixing community using the creative assets of the production in new and amazing ways to build on what we have achieved.

I’d like to think this is the future of filmmaking. At least one future! There’s plenty of room for different models of production, but this could be the one that really fits with creating cult media. As the director, I will get much more creative control of the feature, while Angels, who would normally be called fans (although that sounds too passive in this context) get more involvement in the filmmaking world. It is more immersive as an entertainment experience, and more participative if that is what you want.

The creative community of A Swarm of Angels is capped at 50,000, and on a global level that is a very small, exclusive amount. You have to put a lot of effort into creating the right kind of community, but once you do that, the Swarm can become a way to support an artist’s work as a self-sustaining creative community. That’s tremendously exciting.

What role has the Internet played in all this?

I don’t believe anyone has attempted the creation of a film with such a highly distributed team! This is Cinema 2.0 because it wouldn’t be possible without the current social aspects and networking power of the Internet. No one has been foolhardy enough to suggest making a seven figure Creative Commons–licensed media work. I wanted something to capture people’s imagination.

Related Links

• onedotzero
• A selection of recent films from the onedotzero festival
• A Swarm of Angels
• The Light Surgeons

About the authors