This was made in support of Reboot‘s National Day of Unplugging: 24 hours of turning off the old laptop, starting at sundown, Friday, March 19. That’s today.

Footage was shot by Brooklyn’s mssng peces, Sarah Shewey (pinkcloudevents.com) with shaky backup flip-cam footage by Saskia Wilson-Brown.

Check out more of Evan’s work at seeper.com. The sphere was a collaboration between Seeper and Pufferfish. I’ll be uploading more videos from TEDActive, all week.

Check out more about James Patten and the Audiopad, as well as other projects, at http://www.pattenstudio.com/. I’ll be uploading more videos from TEDActive, all week.

See the video on Vimeo or read the article in Filmmaker Magazine here.

If you have any questions, suggestions, addendums, please email me at saskia@saskiawilsonbrown.com.

With all that said, the benefits are tangible: In its first few days of existence, this new brainchild of filmmaker Jamie King has already proven to be very effective.

So what is VODO? Simply put, it’s an additional distribution option for filmmakers, one that utilizes and consolidates existing file-sharing systems -- as they put it: ‘a distribution system for the post-copyright age’.

What VODO proposes is that P2P filesharing services (such as The Pirate Bay) can be utilized by filmmakers to reach an unprecedented amount of potential viewers. What makes VODO’s service special is its use of the ‘Distribution Coalition (DISCO)’–  a coalition of the P2P/filesharing sites. VODO acts as a pipeline of content, populating the various P2P services with the films it represents. This, in turn, allows filmmakers to get their content released in the P2P universe in a cohesive way, with the chance of an income through crowd-sourced donations. The purpose, then, of  VODO is to harness the filesharing world and distribute content in it in a way that benefits filmmakers (and, eventually, creators of all stripes).

What this means – in layman’s terms – is that if your film gets selected for VODO, it will get a cohesive release across across a wide selection of filesharing sites and services, complete with an actionable donation capability which will allow people who watch your film to support you with money.

So, my ask to you is that you go support this new tool for independent filmmakers today. Here are several ways you can help:

• By checking out Ivo Gormley’s documentary: US NOW (don’t forget to donate some cash back to the filmmaker)
• By subscribing or donating to VODO
• By spreading the word to your independent filmmaker friends
• By submitting your own film for this.

If you doubt the reach of filesharing, note that VODO launched a few days ago (on the 14th of October, specifically) with the documentary US NOW, and, at the time of writing, has already obtained 100,000 downloads for filmmaker Ivo Gormley.

That, my friends, is a hell of a lot of downloads.