Hello there. We’re changing things up. You’ll still get our emails, but we’ll be using Substack to deliver them. Hooray to a new year (almost) and new things!
The title of this newsletter will be familiar to all of you ReelwUrld Day 1’s: Make Movies with the World. Why are we writing this? To document our learnings, challenges, conversations, fleeting thoughts, milestones, etc. as we build a social network where anything you post is a part of a movie or TV show.
We want to be 100% transparent with our story and share it as authentically as possible in hopes that what we’re going through can help others on their journey to create, innovate, and dream big.
For the sake of brevity, we will pick up where we left off in our last email (you can read all our previous emails on our website).
Just days after we launched our equity crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder, a Justice For Hire (our first crowdsourced cinematic universe and app) power user came to Los Angeles to shoot with us.
We met Z (in-character Guru Mer Kaba) on the JFH app about a year ago and he’s been a member of our app test team for a while now. Meeting Z in real life was incredibly energizing and a reminder of why we’re doing what we’re doing.
ReelwUrld’s vision is to Make Movies with the World (hence the name of this newsletter). Our goal is to continue to expand our crowdsourced cinematic universe by touring the world to film with audience members who create their own characters and produce content on our platform. That’s one of many reasons (learn about the others here) why our raise on WeFunder is important to us.
Why do we believe audience participation is the future of filmmaking? There has been little to no innovation in how to engage audiences in entertainment in ways that are actually healthy for culture. We’ve got a big vision to break a cycle of toxicity and exclusion in entertainment by making audiences and fans (the “U” in ReelwUrld is for you—the audience) a part of the stories they love in a meaningful and constructive way.
We are building a process 1) to transform the consumer into the creator, which will break tired patterns of consumption (sequels, reboots, the same stories over and over), 2) to inspire studios to collaborate with their audiences to make better shows and movies, and 3) for collective storytelling to have global impact.
This is the future of filmmaking because it has to be—what we watch affects our real life and real life needs to be better. Collective storytelling has the power to make the world a better place. Check us out on WeFunder and spread the word. wefunder.com/reelwurld