So, what is ReCinema, you ask? No, well, let’s pretend you did.

In short – it’s a collaboration of filmmakers working to evaluate, and hopefully evolve the way film stories are both created and connected with their audiences. Our goal is to yield a working group of practices and people that can produce uniquely compelling films as Cinema enters her next 100 years.

The longer version goes something like this –

Like an increasing number of others, our heads have been reeling at the day and age we live in as filmmakers. Cinema is a medium that has barely crested its 1st century of existence and what future it may hold in both means and form is exhilarating. What Cinema truly is and can be as it breaks free from the technology and conventions that created it is anyone’s guess, but we certainly stand at a unique juncture.

Looking forward, which then of our existing filmmaking practices and conventions still contribute meaningfully and which are dead-weight? Which are core to the medium itself and which need to be re-imagined into something altogether new to meet the opportunities currently at the doorstep?

Exciting ideas and discussion on a number of these concerns have been percolating in the filmmaking community lately - particularly around the biggest elephant in the room: Once you can readily conceive, produce and disseminate a film how do you get anyone to not only learn of its existence but to actually give a rat’s ass about it?

While this is certainly at the front of our minds, our focus is at the beginning of the process – What practices, questions and environment can we employ to help nurture everyday film stories into truly magnificent ones? How can we best cultivate a community of filmmakers and an environment that helps them create stories that rise to the very top – films that someone can’t help but talk about?

ReCinema is a grand experiment, aimed at condensing a range of what we believe to be the best business and production ideas available. As such, we’ve developed a big crush on the folks at Pixar, who exercise very interesting creative practices and culture.

Ed Catmull, Pixar’s President, poses the wonderful question “Which is more important to the success of a film - its story or its people?” In his estimate, story ideas are a cheap commodity, whereas quality people that have the skills and talent to shape ideas into a great stories are precious stones that need to be discovered, cut and polished. We’d agree.

The people and practices at Pixar have managed to routinely transform the average, and often unremarkable, film story into something uniquely compelling. (Utilizing creative practices and culture that aren’t by any means exclusive to animated films.) Our thoughts aren’t limited to Pixar’s model exclusively, but theirs serves as the best, most cohesive real-world case study available to date.

As the first step, we’re currently testing a non-traditional approach to the story development and preproduction processes; blurring the lines of the individual aspects of production into a single collaborative and iterative process. At its core, this involves bringing as many of the creative entities involved with a film, from writer t0 director to talent to editor to composer, in at the earliest stages of development possible rather than at various stages throughout (sometimes, often times, at the very end.)

Officially, ReCinema put both feet on the ground June of 2009, where 8 select individuals were invited to sit down over coffee. Of the 8, only 6 showed. What resulted was a list of concepts and ideas for films that totalled nearly 30. Over the subsequent weeks, those 30 were quickly whittled down to about 5. Some scripts were written, and then abandoned, others were written, scrapped and rewritten.

And a few, much to our delight, evolved.