Thursday, July 17, 2008

Sew it yourself

Just today, I was able to get to know a project that fits perfectly to the scope of this blog:

The Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake

Quote from the site:
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and upload them to this site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. Anyone can upload footage. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.
I found it on the Ars Elecronica site, just browsing around.

Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera - Internet Archive

Side note: Happy coincidence my wife makes handmade dolls besides her main work, restoration of pottery and paintings. Occasionally we have to work side-by-side but the connection was not evident to me.

Related articles: The Bigger Picture
- Women Editors

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

How to share your taste with the world

It seems that very soon, some giant Internet players are planing to put some "user generated content" on the "People's Domain" (no, not quite public domain - and no, not creative content) . In fact, it seems that some big logs on users video viewing habits are going to be "recycled" in a whole new context.

I am sorry not to go into more details, but my "engrish" and legal skills fall short on the magnitude of the scale of this subject.

You can check more info about the actual news report here and here.

This news relate to the theme of this blog in at least one point:
Recycling old "Kinematics".

From Wikipedia: "Kinematics (Greek κινειν, kinein, to move) is a branch of dynamics which describes the motion of objects without consideration of the circumstances leading to the motion"...

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Blended model

Tomorrow is the day of the launch of the The Tracey Fragments DVD.

This film was, to my knowledge, the first "major" feature film (by "major" I mean an indie film that opened the panorama section of the Berlinale, and was on festivals all over the world, with an Oscar nominee leading actress like Ellen Page and an awarded director like Bruce McDonald) to make available it's raw footage under a Creative Commons license on the net for others to recut and remix.

It is a milestone, because it's a great example of the possible merge of the traditional commercial model with the "new" remix culture more open Creative Commons licenses. The director's cut theatrical release itself is not free nor open, but a limited version of the raw footage (limited in the sense that the original footage distributed was highly compressed and in broadcast standard resolution) was made available for remixes under a CC by-nc-sa license.

This model, seems very promising, since it grants original authors revenue streams from their commercial releases as well as giving anyone interested the ability to create new works based on the source. This cause a synergy between the two attracting public attention primarily to the originating work but also to it's derivatives.

With the raw's release, a contest on the film's web site tittled Re-fragmented promoted the recut of the full feature on a linear fashion as an alternative to the Mondrian's style, picture-in-picture assembly of the theatrical version. The prize to the selected winner was an editing software package and the inclusion of their cut on the extras of the official DVD.

There are not many, if any, feature films to this date that fit this profile.

One funny fact is that I was only able to watch the theatrical release itself five months after I got my hands on the raw footage through the movie's website. The film only reached cinemas here in Portugal long after all the buzz around Ellen Page's Oscar nomination for her hole in June, and The Tracey Fragments exposure on festivals around the globe. I like the film on the big screen a lot.

Along with the great, "hardcore", open-film model of projects like Big Buck Bunny it would be great to see this blended business model more widely used.



Disclosure: I made this "Cinema 2.0 Promo" with "The Tracey Fragments" Creative Commons licensed footage under by-nc-sa. This video is not related with, nor endorsed by, the original film authors. But was only possible because the director, whole cast and crew, production company and the distributors of the original film allowed basically anyone to do it, so check who they are.

Resource links: cbc article - odd facts
- in action - modern art

Friday, July 4, 2008

Films under Creative Commons licenses

The Creative Commons Wiki has a new page regarding highly notable films under CC licenses.

Also two pages on notable filmmakers and all fields case studies.

This is good news for anyone searching for inspiration or research material on films under CC licenses.

Check it out, and if you know about undocumented works help building the wiki.

Words are clouding my mind

I hope in the next months I find the time to dump all these words "clouding" my mind on the screen in a more cinematic way, but until then this image is all I have got to show.

Cloud made on Wordle - CC By