Internet Crowd-sourcing Used to Create Animated Film

The scene: a shop selling musical instruments. The characters: An electric guitar called Riff; Vanessa, a classical violin; a drum kit called Sticks and keyboards, Keys. The storyline: Riff falls in love with Vanessa, the "violin of his dreams" in a rock version of Romeo and Juliet.

The basic storyboard of Live Music, a five-minute short animated film, is the kind of fare that might comfortably emerge from the big studios such as Pixar or Dreamworks. But in the manner of its creation the film, which it has just been given the green light for a cinema release in November, is highly unusual.

It represents the most ambitious attempt yet to apply the interactive model of Wikipedia, otherwise known as "crowd-sourcing" to the animated film world.

The film has been created by a team of 51 people from around the world who responded to an invitation through the social networking site Facebook.

They have participated in a group experiment that is being billed as the largest global collaboration in animation.

Live Music was the brainchild of Yair Landau, who as a former head of Sony's digital pictures division steered into being such mainstream films as Surf's Up and Monster House. He wanted to see whether innovations pioneered in the gaming world, such as the ability of players to modify their own games, could be applied to the production of films.

He conceived the Romeo and Juliet-as-musical-instruments storyline, worked it up into a storyboard and enlisted the help of Intel and the online animation group Aniboom to develop software that participants could download and use to create their own 3D computer drawings. The movie was split up into 107 shots which individuals could create themselves, working through Landau's page on Facebook which he calls Mass Animation.

More than 50,000 people signed up to the project from 101 countries. They voted for their favourite drawings, whittling the pool of artists down to the successful 51 who each won $500 (£304).

Landau said the resulting short film is "a clearly less professional product than you would get from animators who have been in the industry for years. But it's a start and an indication of what can be done."

He said the participants had enriched the story. For instance, an animator from the UK added her own touch of having two cymbals kiss each other in mockery of the guitar and violin's love.

The film will be rolled out at the Los Angeles shorts film festival next week and the Siggraph's computer animation festival in New Orleans in August. In November it will appear in cinemas as a preview to Sony's animated feature Planet 51.

Landau said that his company is already working on a storyboard for a full-length feature film created similarly through the Wiki model.

But not everybody is enamored of the idea. Opponents of the collaborative concept have set up their own Facebook page called Anti Mass Animation in which professional animators denounce Landau's innovation as a disguised sweat shop.

The 21 members of this group say Live Music is a "cheapskate" film produced through a "degrading, exploitative, manipulative and downright insulting new method".

To which Landau replies: "There are a lot of people who have entrenched positions and are threatened by all sorts of technology."