Collaborative cinema has been a pipe dream for the creative community for quite some time. We’ve previously looked at examples ranging from a fanmade Lord of the Rings prequel to the excellent PSST! project to ambitious collaborative 3D animation. Now, life.turns. approaches collaborative cinema from a photography angle with an ongoing global collaborative film project composed of 1205 photographs taken in 21 countries over 40 days.

Created as part of the 2010 Edinburgh Arts Festival, the project invites contributors to upload photos of themselves in one or more of eight figures of basic human walking. The images are then assembled and arranged in a sequence reflecting a natural gait, stitched together into a virtual motion collage.

You can also create your own zoetrope by remixing different images within the sequence.

The film is currently 3 minutes and 21 seconds long, and they’re running low on poses of Figure 3 above, so chip in by joining Blipfoto and uploading an image of yourself in that (or another) pose.

Though certainly not an original idea (remember that Gmail envelope video from 2007?), life.turns. offers an utterly delightful example of simple collaborative storytelling harnessing the power of global interconnectedness.

Bonus points for using Turn by Travis, with the artist’s permission, as the score.)