Nokia Productions Premiere

I was in Los Angeles for two days to see the premiere of Nokia Production's social collaboration video directed by Spike Lee. The video was impressive to say the least and the Avril Lavigne concert followup was very energetic.



We had a chance to interview Spike Lee on his involvement on this project, access to the VIP floor, and a bit of the Avril Lavigne concert - all after the jump.


This past summer Nokia started an online social collaboration project to bring together images, photos, sounds, and video from people all over the world to create one movie that would be directed by spike lee. There were three themes staggered by 3 weeks each: birth, life, and death. Five winners were chosen from each of the themes and would receive a trip to LA to watch the premiere.

So faster foward a couple months of hours of content capturing and editing and we have October 14, 2008, the date Nokia Production's social collaboration is revealed.

Interview with Spike Lee
But before we jump to the video, a few of us bloggers who won the WOM World Death Scene Challenge (a mini contest within the final theme of death to remake a death scene from a movie) got a chance to interview Spike Lee:




Source: ekai on YouTube

You can read/watch the video of Spike Lee's interview on a number of other blogs like WOM World. In short, he talked about content is more important than the tools that were used to create it and with technology advancing so fast it's giving everyone the tools to create their own creations that were once only available to the priviledged.

The Venue
Later that evening we arrived at Nokia LA Theatre where they were setting up the stage for the concert and admiting the finalists of the Nokia Productions to the VIP area.


It was a good idea for Nokia to have it outside. The weather was very cooperative in LA and people can drop by to see what was happening.

All the winners had access to the VIP floor:




The Announcment
I had a lot of doubts about the video. I saw the videos from the winners of the various themes and were so different from each other, which is to be expected when you have a contest for content coming from all over the world. If Spike Lee was going to limit himself to just content from those 15 winners then I wasn't sure how he would make the video coherent let along be of a decent length.

So here is Spike Lee and announcing the video:



The Collaboration
With over 100,000 participants and over 1,000 media submissions from all over the world with Spike Lee directing, I would like to present our collaboration:



My Thoughts
I was impressed by the amount of footage he took from all the submissions. It was good to see that he didn't limit himself to the video from the 15 winners. It's a lighthearted video with a good matching song. Although our blogging team had some mixed feelings about it, I thought it was a good video and a good first time around.
What did you think of the video?

Outside was a booth to compete for a 5310 by playing Guitar Hero 3 Mobile edition and collect prints of photos they took of the winners with the 5310.


The Concert
The follow up to the Nokia Productions video was Avril Lavigne's concert:


Avril sang really well. Sad to say, I was slowly getting into her music too. She was playing all here oldies - stuff that had us going, "I know that song!"



Final thoughts
Overall it was a successful event with a lot of energy. I really hope Nokia extends their social collaboration efforts by making this an annual project since a lot of people didn't hear about it until it was near the end. It will definitely help push Nokia as not only a handset maker but also a company that helps people leverage technology in their creative efforts.

You can view all my Nokia Productions Premiere photos and videos on my Ovi channel

You can also view the video of Spike Lee's interview on WOM World.