Three blogs?

I’ve got three blogs going about film making – why? Each of the blogs was started to serve different projects, but now I’m getting a bit confused… so it’s time to sort this all out.

Let’s begin with an inventory sorted by inception date…

http://holyboners.com – document the post production of Daughter of God

http://artisthouse.com/fellowship – planning projects with the blood tribe (password protected)

http://ondesire.com – document the original On Desire sailing project, a collaboration with Kai Schwarz

A blog is a sort of journal that can be shared, either with the public or with a finite group. Initially I began experimenting with blogs as a tool to clarify and plan projects. I’m also down with sharing my process so that others can benefit from my mistakes and triumphs – that’s sort of open source and creative commons ethic.

I’ve always been into writing for project planning and emotional processing. Making the transition from private journals to public blogging has been interesting. I still do some private processing and confidential planning, but probably 70% of what I used to scribble in my closet is now posted to the world wide archive. The experiment has been productive and worthy of another iteration.

So what’s the vision for blogs? Here’s an assessment of needs and potential opportunities…

1. a general notebook about movie making where I can work out what I am discovering and where I want to go
2. a collaborative space to share ideas with select collaborators
3. a place to send potential investors and collaborators to demonstrate credibility (audience)
4. the ability to express myself in full color, without having to worry about sounding professional and marketable – whatever that means.
5. being able to effectively plan, vision and document, effective defined as clear, comprehensive and quick.
6. implement a structure for organizing posts and where they should originate from, eg is there a mother ship blog about film making that feeds several project specific blogs or should it be the other way around? Is there a better way other than cross posting and links?
7. motivate crew members  and facilitate communication

Some of these objectives are at odds with each other, but here’s a first go at sorting out what goes where.

• meta blog – where big themes are born
• project or specific blog(s) – a project is typically an art project like a movie, play or performance, but it could also be a specific shift in public awareness or an environmental objective. This is where the specific lessons happen
• confidential or just plain gonzo blog, not for public consumption, incubation of very new ideas. Active crew only.

Item 6 is the crux. If there are multiple blogs, where do i post what? If there is a mothership blog where I post everything and then crosspost to other project specific blogs, that implies I am the only one blogging at the mothership and collaborators are blogging at the blogs that belong to their projects. The mothership metapor would seem to present a sort of meta view of all projects, enabling me to extract big lessons from specific projects and retransmit to all. On the other hand, if the mothership is just a collection of all posts from other projects, then I would be posting from several blogs to the mothership. What if the mothership blog collected posts from all other projects and also originated the occasional meta post?

Let’s say there are several project blogs, each with it’s own team. They transmit all their posts to the mothership, forming a giant collection of all posts for all my projects, posts from a host of collaborators.

I better do some dishes and give this a rest for the moment. Be back soon!