Creativity and the crowd

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape" from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

The Johnny Cash project has been blogged about a lot recently, not least by Melex from BBHlabs yesterday. It is a staggering project and one of the most attractive crowdsourcing projects to date. Even more ambitious is Star Wars Uncut, which released a teaser trailer this week. That project has recreated the entire Star Wars New Hope movie in 15 second chunks.

In both cases the crowd has been used to collectively create something. However it teaches us some things about when crowdsourcing works best.

1. It is something people are passionate about.

Both Johnny Cash and Star Wars have legions of devoted fans who are happy to spend time and energy devoted to honouring their heroes.

2. It is Individual

Each individual in the crowd in these projects is given a very specific task, which is relatively easy to create and becomes part of the project as a whole. Crowdsourcing in which every person is meant to offer a solution to the whole problem, and the best aspects are then picked out (such as Crowdspring logo design), tend to be less successful.

3. The project is a recreation

This is controversial, but do these work mainly because the initial creativity didn't start in the "crowd"? It was composers or artists or directors. The crowdsourcing element is secondary and just allows more people to become a part of that original piece of work, rather than creating something entirely new. Thoughts?