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

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

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.

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.

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

Creative Commons and Cinema 2.0

The Creative Commons blog made a great post about Cinema 2.0 with some big projects being listed and also a kind note about my small promo done with CC licensed footage from "The Tracey Fragments"

If you are looking for some alternative projects real world examples of how audiovisual production is changing, I think it is worth reading.