Fade out

Time to end.

As it happens with most personal blogs, this one is going to stop. The decision was easy, this was a fun only project and the fun has long gone.

If someone was kind enough to take the time to read any of the posts here, I thank you (no hate mail please).

Fade out.
(nice public domain music in the background)

Mashup geek

Want kind of mashups will be possible five years from now?

Firefox 3.5: experiment with Canvas/Video
Dynamic, ever changing mashups.

More about it: Making Video a First Class Citizen - mozbox

Is Cinema a set of Languages?

Chose your subtitle - From Pop!Tech / subs from dotSUB under CC

Related links: Phree - Haneke's film narrative

Let´s Sing the Blues

There is a new full animated feature film under a Creative Commons license.

Sita Sings the Blues

Directed By: Nina Paley / CC Licensed but Restrictions may apply.

Quote:
Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told."

Watch the full film online.

Links:
Director's interview / Business model / Reviews 1 2 3 / More Info
Awards / Soundtrack composer / On Wikipedia

Mind Games

By: PES
More about it: Homepage - Interview - Posts
Crosswired: Reality Check

‘Yes We’re Cans’

Video contests are everywhere, including RAT - Renew America Together.

Quote:
"We've teamed up with YouTube to sponsor a video competition. Submit your video -- three minutes or under -- telling us what you plan to do on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day."


First place video, "Yes, We're Cans," from Tennessee.

Language can change. Its a start.

Let the music flow

New year, news to the ears:

N.A.S.A. "Money" feat. David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip from Paul Griswold on Vimeo.

Video directed by Syd Garon & Paul Griswold, featuring the artwork of Shepard Fairey (the artist "responsible" for this iconic poster).

More about N.A.S.A.:

A kind of re-use intended to stop abuse

Re-use of footage re-contextualized by heavy video post-production manipulation to make this three videos from Amnesty International.

Quote:
"Amnesty International is marking the 60th anniversary of the universal Declaration of Human Rights with a new online film showing the power of individuals to protect the human rights of people all over the world. Work on the film required the equivalent of 50 days of post production, achieved by a collaboration by Rushes, Framestore and Smoke & Mirrors in London and New York."


Song in the video: R.E.M. - Until The Day Is Done

Previous examples:




I like a lot this videos, but this kind of imagery manipulation only possible because of the advance on digital video post on recent years sure raise many ethical questions. The absence of abundance on relevant precedents create a gap waiting to be filled with questionable uses for this plastic surgery of history, news and propaganda. Maybe medical ethics committees advices on cosmetic plastic surgery are the best place to start...
Link: Protect the Human / Amnesty International / Is Humor Immoral? / Anatomy of Movement

Total Recut contest: The winner is...

The Total Recut contest "What is Remix Culture?" has ended. My favorite entry got the silver medal...


By Jata Haan

Amazing creative re-use. It jumps out of the box.

The First Place prize went to DJ Le Clown with Xmas in New York City. You can watch the winners here.

Spoted at: CAF

Are computers ruling or ruining your life?

Absurd remix by: Alex Ezorsky-lie

According to this video, chances are, you have been already "screened". At least you should choose what goes on to the projector...

Scream if you find a way into having control over what is screened.

Wanna work on the movies?

Portuguese subtitles available.

This is a fan trailer edit I made with footage from the original short film "Vicious Circle".

Go watch the original, and "pay" some respect to the talent that made this funny spoof at industrial films "behind the scenes" long time ago.

Original credits:
Producer: Calvin Company
Source: Prelinger Archives / Internet Archive
License: Public Domain

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

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"...

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

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

Cut to the point

There are numerous editing contests popping up on the web lately.

Since the last post, there seems to be a huge boom on mashup and editing competitions with different focus on subject, objective and rules.

So, unlike the last post's Total Recut, there is a more professional focused contest making waves on the web. It is the Open Cut Contest. If you want to have a try go check the rules. Unlike many others on this one you have to pay a small fee and provide them a external hard drive in which the footage will be loaded and posted back to you. This condition was a "turn off" to me, since paying a two way posting trip for a HD to/from Portugal to US would boost costs considerably. Also, there are some technical considerations to have in mind. Never the less, the possibility of having access to this kind of footage, 4k full resolution clips, from the short Susannah, is a milestone on collaborative film making on the web. Congrats to them.

But if this contest is not just about selling "cheap" RED camera footage (which my guess is that's not the case), why not adopt a workflow that allow people to pay only the contest fee of 25$ and give it a shot at real world film editing by having low-res proxy footage available to download?

Why limit it, logistically, by requiring 250gb HDs to costly fly all over the world? Copying that amount of data of and to multiple HDs, packaging and posting them is also a very time and labor intensive task to them compared to down sampling the footage and uploading it to the web just once (bandwidth costs can be more easily managed).

Contestants could then edit the material, in a low-res offline, and easily upload it to the Open Cut site. The winning entry could then be eye conformed (or a FCP XML or generic EDL provided by the contestants) to DI and final print output. Of course, this is not either mine neither a new idea, just the standard workflow.

Also, would be great to have samples of the footage online for review as I am sure would attract more people to the project. And last, it says that the footage is under a Creative Commons license, but I could not find which one on their site (this blog claim it is CC BY NC SA), if that is the case, will this footage be available legally for free, for anyone to use, if any of the contestants share it online after the end of the competition?

I noticed that they changed some of the requirements (see the comments on this post) to accommodate non-Mac users, showing some will to have a broader scope to this effort. Maybe in a future edition they consider a more inclusive workflow.

Image under Creative Commons By: Antediluvial

Update: By the time I published this post, all entries on the contest were already closed due to high demand.

Recycled News

What more appropriated post for this "would be" cinema recycled footage blog than recycled news?

Well... News about a remix contest dealing with the subject of remix culture.

Not entirely new, but it would not be worth it if it was...

More info at: Total Recut
Spotted at: Recycled Cinema

Is It Fair to Use It?

This post is a collection of some links of interest, regarding this complicated issue of Copyright / Fair Use when re-purposing media content (also mentioned as "Borrowed Material").

1. Recut, Reframe, Recycle: An Interview with Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi - By Henry Jenkins
   
2. Center for Social Media School of Communication at American University
3. EFF: Fair Use FAQ - Electronic Frontier Foundation
4. Copyright and Fair Use - Stanford University Libraries
5. Creative Commons FAQ
6. Copyright Management Center
   

This list is provided here only as a starting point for research on this topic of copyright / fair use of existing media files on new works. Keep in mind that I personally did not read all the related documentation on these links nor have any legal background to be able to digest it properly.

From what I read there are still plenty of reasons to be confused about, despite the quality of the papers, because of the complexity and subjectivity of some of the issues involved.

I have this "kid like" dream of simplicity winning over complexity on social interactions (or at least in art and media production) and this whole bureaucracy involving copyright simply destroy any creative impulse that is not: Either a consolidated effort or a fool one. I am afraid I fall into the later category...

Open source, collaboration and animation.

Big Buck Bunny is a 3D animation short movie from the "Blender Institute". It is the result of Blender's Project Peach team effort. The animation was done with, of course, Blender open source 3D software


Official Trailer

The short will premiere on 10 April, at "Studio K" cinema, Amsterdam. This is another great step in cinema made with "open tools", like open source software blender in this particular case.

The collaboration behind the development of Blender is, in itself, a case study example of success on open source software. More yet, the community formed around it (Blender Artists, Blender Nation, the user forums, etc), is a key element that brings together everybody from home users, to developers, to professional 3D artists. This has made possible to create a credible, free, alternative tool not only to make films but also games, architecture pre-viz, and blah, blah,blah...

The first "major" release of this kind was the film "Elephants Dream" two years ago, which was an important milestone.

"The 3D animated short ‘Elephants Dream’ will today (May 18, 2006) be released as a free and public download. This is the final stage of a successfully completed Open Movie project which has been community-financed, using only Open Source tools, and opening up the movie itself as well as the entire studio database for everyone to re-use and learn from. The movie and production files are licensed as “Creative Commons Attribution 2.5″, which only requires a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution."
(Blender Foundation, Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

I watched Elephants Dream, and got that feeling that the film, as great as it was, was "not quite there yet" in terms of production value (ok, unfairly compared to multi-million dollar, major Hollywood studio productions). But I found it too, that the movie was a major break trough in this "open movie" production model and has great artistic value (on character design, art direction, etc). The fact that was distributed under Creative Commons license, on the net, with full Blender project files available at any one's reach is also remarkable.

This new short, the Big Buck Bunny seems to raise the expectation bar even higher in terms of artistic and technical skill set value.

Other resources: Blender on Wikipedia / SFX on Blender