This interview with Brian Graden and Joseph Gordon-Levitt was conducted at the 2015 ProMax Conference. Content has been edited for clarity. See part three here.
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Well in sifting through 130,000 contributions, we actually came to rely on certain people in the community who proved over time they had really good taste. They sort of became an extension of our staff and your sensibility.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
That’s the thing. The notion that a computer can go through all that I think is bullshit. I think frankly, Netflix is lying when they say that they have an algorithm that can recommend you good movies. I watch Netflix, I pay $7 a month, but when I look through and it’s recommending things to me, I don’t find that it’s necessarily so great at it.
The way we try to do it is not based on a computer algorithm. The way we try to do it is based on a network of human beings and you trust the tastes of a person, and that person trusts the tastes of those people, and those people trust the tastes of their people. Through all of those filtrations, we end up finding the things that resonate with the benevolent dictator who’s directing the show.
This actually might be a good time to show you guys one of the finished collaborations look like when it’s actually aired on television. Can you set up the first stars’ clip?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Sure. So this is a short film that we made that exemplifies how we make things. The challenge was to come up with a story about first times because the theme of the episode was the number one because it was our first episode. We asked the community to either write stories or talk in front of the camera and tell stories about something having to do with first times.
To me, this really gets at the strength of how we’re doing it. If you hired a roomful of Hollywood screenwriters, they never would have come up with this. But this young woman contributed a story about the first time she ever saw the stars when she was 16 years old and how that had happened. She grew up with an eye condition. When she was 16, her dad had the brilliant idea to buy her a pair of night vision goggles that he got out of a Russian military surplus catalog.
She wrote this whole story and had so much detail and it was this beautiful father-daughter story. We adapted it into a short film and the production was all made collaboratively. We shot actors in front of a green screen and then put that green screen footage up on our site so that illustrators could all individually contribute graphical elements that all get animated together. You’ll see every little thing on here was made by tons of different individual people. The score is done the same way. How many television shows have real violinists playing?
The clip starts at 15:34.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju-jiXEO7ro
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Please see part five of the interview here.