Brett Gaylor joins Drumbeat team

I’m very happy to announce that Brett Gaylor officially joined the Mozilla Drumbeat team earlier this month. He’ll be playing the role of project producer — leading his own Web Made Movies project and helping to find new Drumbeat projects over time. Brett will also be directing a documentary series about Mozilla and the future of the web.

Photo: CC-BY, Joi Ito

Brett’s already made great strides setting up the Web Made Movies lab initiative with Seneca College. The idea is to get filmmakers and web developers collaborating on new tech tools that shape what cinema will look like on the open web. The first project coming out of this lab is popcorn.js, which was demo’ed in early alpha at Whistler. A polished version of that demo is here:

Also, Brett has started work on a documentary where Mozillians will paint a picture of the open web that we’re building. He interviewed about a dozen people at Whistler and has a number of other shoots set up. Footage and a call for participation will start leaking out through the fall, with first episodes or edited clips coming by the end of the year.

For those haven’t heard of Brett before: he is the director of RIP: A Remix Manifesto, an awesome film on copyright and culture that has been broadcast in over 20 countries and seen by millions He also founded OpenSourceCinema.org, an experiment in applying open source principles to filmmaking which was used to get thousands of people to contribute to the making of RIP. In many ways, Web Made Movies is a continuation of the Open Source Cinema experiment.