Facebook, with sponsorship support from Intel and AutoDesk, is hosting an online collaboration called Mass Animation designed to produce a short animated film entitled Live Music directed by Yair Landau (The Chub Chubs), about the ‘unlikely’ romance between a guitar and a violin. Now, absolving the story itself of criticism except to say that it’s like something Disney would’ve done in the 1940s, or Pixar in the 1980s, the noteworthy aspect of this project is the distributed production model.

The production of animation, as I have long maintained, will point the way toward new models for production for all sorts of products and brands, just as television animation led the way in outsourcing manufacturing to Asia in the early 1980s, ten years before American industry embraced the model en masse. How it works is going to be a key to the creation of jobs and the generation of new wealth in the networked economy. (more…)