Norman Hollyn, head of the editing track at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, has a [blog post up](http://filmindustrybloggers.com/theeditor/2009/04/10/crowdediting-working-with-a-lot-of-other-people/) about “crowd-editing,” the post-production equivalent of crowdsourcing.
> Right now, the Advanced Editing class at USC is made up of 11 students who have each taken the dailies of the feature film THE NINES (the really interesting and compelling, Ryan Reynolds/Hope Davis/Melissa McCarthy film directed by John August of whom I’ve spoken about a number of times) and are cutting it into an alternate version of that feature film. I assigned a different section to each of the 11 back in January.
> All of them read the script and we talked about the plot, the characters, the subtext, the arc of the story — in short, all of the things that go into editing the film. We were visited by John and his editor, Doug Crise. Then the students started cutting together the film, one scene at a time. We watched scenes in class and I gave notes, along with the class. At one point, about six weeks ago, we finally had the entire film assembled and watched it in class as a full-length first cut of a feature film and stepped back to critique it.
This is the cut I now have on DVD, which I’ll watch this weekend. I’m fascinated and a little terrified to see what they’ve done.
As I said when I debuted the film at Sundance in 2007, I would like to make all the source material for anyone who wants to recut it, assuming legal and logistical hurdles can be overcome. The [trailer competition](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/trailer-winners) was a start. This semester’s project at USC has been another helpful trial run.