'The War Tapes': Making movies the Web 2.0 way

The producers of the documentary "The War Tapes" are looking for a few good videos. Plus audio, photos and plain text, too.

The Web site for the 94-minute film, which premiered over the weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival, wants to be more than a piece of online promotional material. It's also intended to serve as "a place for citizen soldier video, audio, and words," according to the site's FAQ.

To what end? "We believe that the internet can change the way we experience everything, but especially war," the site says.

The call for contributions from regular folks is in keeping with the spirit--and the creation--of the movie itself. To gather footage for "The War Tapes," director Deborah Scranton put consumer-grade video cameras from Sony in the hands of a group of soldiers from the New Hampshire National Guard. (A front-page story in Thursday's Boston Globe plays up the regional angle.)

The soldiers regularly uploaded Quicktime files of events on the Iraq battlefield and chatted on IM with Scranton about what had happened and how best to tell the story.

"The unseen collaborator on the film is the internet," the filmmakers declare. "This is a Web 2.0 outside the wire - the intimate power of the internet exploding on the movie screen. Without instant messaging, the soldiers could never have become filmmakers - without email and cheap video, they soldiers could never have told their stories as they happened."

The producers say that "The War Tapes" is neither pro- nor antiwar. "It's not trying to answer, 'is this the right war?' Instead, TWT is trying to answer: 'what is war for the soldiers who live it?'"

The film will get a more widespread release starting in June. For a review of the film from the Web site Cinematical, click here.