Vote Hollywood, according to the Vote America web site, will give the audience a voice in influencing filmmaking. The site goes on to state that established filmmakers and stars will post videos of their future projects for audience feedback.
The site also says that this collaboration will allow the audience and Hollywood to realize their vision together.
At the moment the site is very vague about how this process will work. In the past there have been projects that made the audiences input a part of the development. In Project Green-light the audience voted to narrow down the possible scripts and directors.
According to Wikipedia Project Green-light has produced three movies in the United States version and one project in Australia.
The movies were: Stolen Summer, The Battle of Shaker Heights, Solo and Feast. Vote Hollywood most likely will be different in that Project Green-light was a documentary show about a contest to find a project to finance. Vote Hollywood will be a place to poll the audience on projects without producing a documentary upon what happens during the filmmaking process.
Whether or not this will turn out to be a good idea or not will be dependent upon how the information gathered is used by the filmmakers. It is also dependent upon the type of feedback received. If you ask enough people you will find people that hated the movie that made billions of dollars at the box office.
One thing to keep in mind is how the input is formatted. A format with a write what’s on your mind after seeing the video is different from questions with either multiple choice answers. What you get from feedback is based on how the input is given.
If you take there different polls out there as an example of multiple choice questions then you can see how limited they are. Sometimes there is not a choice that matches how you would really answer the poll. As in which actor is your favorite when you don’t like any of the actors that are available as choices for the answer.
If it works this will give the people that pay to watch the movies a voice in the development of those movies and it will give insight for the filmmakers into what the audience wants.
Vote Hollywood is similar to the post production screenings of movies that allow the filmmakers to get input on the progress of the movie from the general audience. The difference is that Vote Hollywood could be done in the development stages of a production possibly saving money.
The saving money could come when the filmmaker discovers that an entire sequence does not work before too much shooting takes place. I mean that the filmmaker discovers what to delete before it is shot or at least too much of it is shot.
I was at a filmmaking marketing workshop this year and the speaker talked about marketing a film before the script is written. The idea of knowing your audience before you write the script is nothing new, but Vote Hollywood could give a fresh look at marketing a movie during the production or even the pre-production phase.
Vote Hollywood could be the next big thing in regards to movie making or it could be another scheme that is soon forgotten. The only way to find out is to give it a chance and see what happens.
Wikipedia: Project Green-light
