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

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

Self Raising Cinema

One word: IndieGoGo

Basically, it is a tool for project funding, recruiting, and promotion; kind of "Self Raising Cinema".

Still looking for user reviews on this...
Spotted here.

Learning how to cook

In this post instead of given you a recipe (which I don't have) for making cinema 2.0, I decided to share a small collection of ingredients and chef's interviews I find interesting to help building some understanding over the subject of alternative ways to produce and share a cinematic work.

These links are not a complete or final resource guide, but only a few I personally find useful.

Filmmakers Seize Control - Arin Crumley's (from Four Eyed Monsters) video on Youtube.
"The Vancouver international film festival invited Lance Weiler and I to come out and be a part of their Forum sessions. This one was called Filmmakers Seize Control."

Fat Free Films - Joel Marshall - Nice podcast selection

Interview with Matt Hanson the creator of the cinema 2.0 project, A SWARM OF ANGELS
on the site The Workbook Project

There are many others. Including some outstanding technical resources like fxguide but these fall out of the scope of this blog because they are hi-end pro ventures that the main focus is on technical skills of big budget movies. But If you already work on the cinema or broadcast field you must be aware of these resources.

I hope people share more links on the subject on the comments section.

Modular Concept

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the patenting of a known iconic brick construction set. Looking at the bright side, is a intelligent colorful toy that worth merit.


© Film by Mirko Horstmann distributed under
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.

More brick films here.

Pablo in motion

Who is Pablo Ferro?

Find out more about the film at Kihou or read this post.

Side note: Nice graphic reference to this "Mondrian" visual mosaic style present on The Tracey Fragments film.