The Grammy award-winning British singer and songwriter Imogen Heap has yet another innovative project up her sleeve. On Friday evening, Nov. 5, at 6:30 GMT, she'll be conducting an 80-piece orchestra and choir live at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The 11 movements, which she composed, will accompany a 30-minute nature film that she crowdsourced.
From beginning to end, the Love the Earth film project, which is a collaboration between Heap and social entrepreneur Thomas Ermacora -- who among other things, founded Clear Village, a London-based organization working on many fronts to develop sustainable communities -- took about eight weeks. But the seed for the idea began germinating more than three years ago for Heap, during a trip to Tanzania. She was riding in a Jeep with some friends. On one side, wildebeests were running beside their vehicle and on the other side, zebras. And they were all going in the same direction.
"There was just this moment that suddenly hit me and I felt really centered, really in the moment and really happy," she says in a video on the site. "I just wanted to get so much more of that into my life."
So she sent out a request to her fans and asked them to send in footage about what made them click with nature.
Over a few shorts weeks, Heap and Ermacora received approximately 1,000 submissions via Vimeo and Youtube. The visuals were stunning: closeups of bees, flowers, and fish, as well as landscapes and time-lapses of clouds and moving water. They began to see loose themes emerging around climate change and endangered species, Ermacora told me.
Eventually, they narrowed their selection down to about 200 clips, ranging from about five seconds to one minute long. Without having to direct it, the images came together in a single, compassionate expression for planet Earth.
"Crowdsourcing releases you from the ego and the need to own," said Ermacora.
That film will stream live Friday night. But Ermacora sees the potential for more like it as a way to promote conservation while "taking out the preaching nature of the environmental movement."
And although this first pass was relatively low on technology (they manually sorted through the films and converted files for compatiblity), Ermacora thinks future films could work as a talent platform for musicians and filmakers. They could be acquired through an Internet portal designed specifically for crowdsourced films, he said. Geotags on images could help map its origin. Software could automatically sort uploaded films by content and convert the movie and music files for compatibility.
"We would love to allow for organizations with meaningful pursuits to be able to crowdsource films for their purposes," he said. "Crowdsoucing could be a way to inundate the world with positive messages."
I believe he's right.
Imogen Heap performs on stage at The Picture House in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo by Marc Marnie/Redferns
Tags: Music, Online Community and Social Networking, Visual Arts
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