Swap Cinema A New Format A New Medium A New Artform

The idea came to me when I was trying to find a creative way to present my first feature film, a film I had produced and directed myself.

I wanted to stream the movie, as a live premiere, because, well, everyone wants to be on a movie's premiere, thus giving the fans of the movie another reason to watch it. It would be just that: a digital broadcast, the movie playing live, like a TV premiere.

But as I started thinking I understood that I jumped to conclusions too quickly, only a handful of people want to attend a premiere because they want to 'be the first' to see the film or because they can't wait to see the movie.

Most people, myself included, find a movie premiere an interesting event because there are so many things one cannot find in the 'ordinary' theatrical exhibition, DVD rental or in the digital streaming experience.

Some reasons of attending the premiere would be the cast and talent attending or maybe the decoration of the theater with the movie's promotional material or even any objects used in the production being in display. But even the particular place the premiere is taking place, the scents of the place and even the road after the rain outside the theater are all things that form the experience of a premiere and makes it something fascinating for the attendees.

Soon after that, I took a grasp of reality. A live premiere needs to exist somewhere in order to be filmed. But there was neither time nor money to organize such an event.

It had become pretty apparent to me (even if I didn't seem to accept it) that my investors weren't going to make anything back, neither me as an investor (let alone the talent & crew) - and I was also owing some funds (and still am) of money I couldn't raise and had to borrow.

So, another idea came to me, it became apparent because it was inspired by my movie itself.

The story of my movie followed a wannabe actor lying at an audition in order to get the role of Raskolnikov (from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 'Crime & Punishment' novel) and bootstrap his career.

My movie was narrated, structurally, with the 'Play within a Play' motif, and did that on three levels. The narration of three different story-lines were comprising the movie:

• The Fictional Character's Lives in the Movie (as in all movies)
• The Rehearsals of 'Crime & Punishment', where the movie's characters are 'acting the play's scenes'
• and The actual filming crew, that makes the movie we are watching (myself and the crew)

all this creates a distortion of reality, and because of the overlapping narratives you cannot know where the fiction ends and where reality begins.

So, as if all these weren't enough, my idea was that I would expand this narrative style in the premiere's narration. And I would do that by creating a 'fake' pemiere, a filmed premiere. My movie would be 'wrapped' by another movie around it.

But in order to get rid of the expenses of such a premiere, I figured I would run the production on a shoestring budget, hiding things I cannot pay (like the exhibition room) in the dark, and add the other 'live premiere narrative' scenes in a camera-held on-location style, which I was pretty accustomed to. And the 'live premiere' need not be anything glamorous but a 'bare bones premiere' that held only the true essence of it: being a premiere. Gone would be the fanfare, we would present a more rough, urban, straightforward kind of first-time exhibition event. There was going to be the actors answering questions, the film crew etc. but there won't be any red carpet glam.

All these would lead up in creating a 'mockumentary', which was exactly what the movie had become in the first place through its editing style.

Now, let's dive into the difficult stuff. The thoughts that came right after.

Everything felt OK up until now. Every decision has been taken thoughtfully and I thought that I was going on the right direction. But when I started playing the premiere broadcast on my head, I started to stumble upon editing problems.

How much time would this fictional premiere would be? 4 hours? Let's say I give 1.5 hours before the movie begins, 2 hours for the movie and another 30 minutes for (let's say) the 'exit feedback' or whatever the structure would be.

At that moment I understood that I cannot have something so lively as a fictional-premiere with a hand-held camera style, and then after 1.5 hours 'cut' to the movie, which would be of an entirely different editing rhythm, narrative style, essence, mood etc.

There was also an artistic fear. I had created this movie following my then a-posteriori style of autodidactism, thus emerging myself into having the experience of filmmaking in order to learn it, and avoid the dull film school studies. This movie was my emergence into it. How good could it be?

My fear was that the movie itself would look really bad versus the 'premiere scenes' because the quality of the latter would be far superior because of the experience I now had in filmmaking. My objections focused on the editing's flow, in terms of narrative and 'jump cuts between different qualities'.

One solution, for example, would be to 'focus on the premiere's rhythm' and show the main movie as clips between the premier's stuff. Thus using the actual movie as a component of the fictional premiere.

But that would have defeat the purpose. It wouldn't be a promotion of the movie anymore, but a movie for its own sake of existence.

These were problems coming up obviously because you can't have a narrative that has no clear focus. And while you can creatively focus on chaos (if that's what you want) you can do that only when you create art or other forms of media where abstraction is welcomed. But this was a premiere, a promotional tool, something having a very clear goal and a very clear message to communicate: the movie.

As a side note, I don't know if there was any other forms of narration in the moving-picture-narrative art that may have solved my problems but the truth was that I was (and still am) not aware of these.

I felt that I was trying to create a new style of narration. I didn't like the feeling, I didn't want to do it. It seemed too messy for me to deal with it. Especially at a moment where I was starting to make some sense of filmmaking. I thought it stupid to embark towards more complex directions before having completely nailed-down the fundamental cornerstones of traditional film narratives.

I believe that any mind would give answers he is trained to give, I don't think that anything ever comes out of nowhere: this introduction serves exactly this purpose. Up until now I've been telling you the questions that I had thrown into my mind. And as I have always seen happen, when I have gone all the way posing one question after another, not fearing to go too deep, I always get an answer, and the answer is always an obvious little answer. It happens unconsciously though - it's not me forcing it out. And as I said, the answer is always something you knew before. So let's explore what had shaped the answer I gave well before the moment I asked the questions so far.

What I have been describing here is reaching the idea, without any magic into it, while of course it's magical, but there is no 'out of nowhere idea'.

First of all my interest in mutlilinear movies from the my early cinefil experiences was something that had stayed with me all along and it was exactly that love that gave me the answer I was looking for. What 'Swap Cinema' is, in a way, seems to me like an answer to these movies from a mind that keeps looking for solutions even 'when they are not needed'.

Multilinear movies, or interlinked films (or whatever we call them), it's movies that rised in prominence around 2000 where, maybe inspired from the rise of the world wide web (as I've seen many film academics indicate), filmmakers explored the world interconnected.

So, movies like Amores Perros (1999), Babel (2006), Pulp Fiction (1994), Crash (2004) and one of my favorite ones, 21 Grams (2003) are examples of stories interconnecting.

In movies like that, you have flashbacks, flashforwards, multiple POVs and more - and all these are used as the structure of the narration, not as flashes happening one time in the movie. They are the actual narrative blocks of the movie.

Secondly and lastly, I had began for quite some time looking at internet services and wanted to explore programming. I wanted too, to have an app that does something, something that would be useful and that would have been created by lines of code alone, that's what thrilled me the most, programming was something so much different from me. But I wanted to do so, because I felt that the people creating the (digital) tools I have been using had way more influence on my work than me myself (something that I had stopped believing for quite some time now.)

So, my answer had two ingredients. One: I'm gonna use programming as the tool. Two: I'm gonna base it in multi-linear narratives.

The idea unfold then very naturally in front of me. What if I had multiple videos playing at the same time, and the user can choose what he wanted to see: the lobby, the cigarette outside in the rain, a couple engaging in intercourse in the toilet or 'my movie' playing in the screening room?

What would the user do? He would Swap.

Immediately afterwards I started to understand the implications of my idea, how it is going to affect many forms of narration. And I really believe that while it may be prove difficult for fictional narrations, the event-coverage industry cannot live without it.