Before music video director Chris Milk unleashed the wonderful Arcade Fire/Wilderness Downtown project on the online world, he had started brewing another ingenious web-based video - this time a memorial to the legendary Johnny Cash.
Ain't No Grave was the last thing Cash recorded in a studio. Milk's tribute has been to invite fans to submit their own single frame for the video - and 250,000 have been submitted so far. Viewers see a video composed of some of those frames, but can also choose director-curated frames, highest-rated frames, abstract frames and so on.
If you want to contribute, the site randomly picks three frames to choose from and then a palette of simple brush and drawing tools, all in black and white, and superimposed on the original frame.
The structure is simple but visually effective. Black and white offers a consistency between very different frames, as does speed and the limits of the on-screen tools. Credit has to go to the Cash Estate for allowing this project to go ahead; the music industry isn't known for its support for web experiments, however compelling.
The Johnny Cash Project strikes another note too, though. Isn't this the mutualisation of the music video? Take one artist, and one well-defined, well-thought out project that channels that enthusiasm and energy to create something new, something more dynamic. The success of crowdsourcing all comes down to the way in which it is managed, and this is imaginative and powerful. It's also never definitive, because it changes with every new frame that is uploaded.
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