After the cheap/consumer products for film making became competitive with professional ones technically and the web 2.0 and relevant innovations made video sharing easier than ever, people started to think about some opportunities of a free film making as in free speech as in free software...
Collaborative, transparent, libertarian model of film making was (and in many aspects still is) a dream yet... 16mm. cameras were a great step for independent film making, specially for those who tried for an alternative point of view in documentary making... The opportunities today is fascinating contrarily to the 16mm. world.
I couldn't write to my English section before but I was taking some notes since last year May, when the first open movie (in the terms of FLOSS) was released by Blender Foundation and the Montevideo Netherlands Media Arts Institute... Elephants Dream was a big milestone both for the maturity of the FLOSS video tools at work and the film making concept with this highly FLOSS influenced model...
Today many projects, manifests can be found on the www... I'm writing my MA thesis on this issue actually, so I'm really interested in new examples, cases in this issue, please leave a comment if you know others...
Briefly, I would like to list the popular and relatively old projects of this concept but I'll continue to put some more works, texts and links further...
Not necessarily free ones:
http://www.plumiferos.com/ One of the successes of the Elephants Dream, a feature animation from Argentine which is been produced by the Blender. (It seems not to be an open (source) movie, but in the context of 'how the open source tools are successful in film making process' it is a good example...)
http://www.echochamberproject.com/ Kent Bye is a film maker who is trying to make an online, collaborative film by using many open source tools and the model itself... I wish Bye could use the free editors like Kdenlive, Kino etc. (Cinerella is something else... really... its nice but... :) )
http://www.myspace.com/mymoviemashup That's not really connected to the open source impact but these kind of cases make the open film making more understandable and possible... Can you imagine how the Linux kernel would be without the Internet? I see some of these projects as the spreading network of the open movie concept...
http://interplast.blogs.com/interplast/2007/04/a_story_of_heal.html Sometimes, I get interesting responses for FLOSS and related concepts... Some people think that the films which are proposed as open/free are just amateur and incompetent ones and they have no other choice... Well I just run away from those idiots for sure, but for who can't... You can give this example as a powerful answer... An Academy Award (Oscar) Winner Documentary, licensed with a Creative Commons...
http://lcmedia.typepad.com/theamericanrevolution/ The American Revolution is another open source documentary tryout on a specific subject: WBCN-FM, the radio station of progressive rock in the golden age of it (I assume those years were the golden age of the progressive...). They seem to be confused about the distinction of open source / free software in the analogy of open source films... They want contribution but they don't talk about the licensing issue much...
Projects which are free as in free speech and free software:
http://orange.blender.org The legendary project which produce "Elephants Dream"... It was a very well example of how the open source model works even in film making process... and it made Blender much more powerful and known... I really admire this one...
http://www.digitaltippingpoint.com/ Exciting project about a documentary database of open source culture... DTP is suggesting about 260 hrs footage of interviews and other documentary material for those who is interested in making an open source documentary about open source... That's one of my best...
http://straycinema.com/ That's another favorite project of mine... Stray team is seeking for many contributors for their film database and any editors who are volunteer to use this database for producing films... Every year the community select the screening list from the projects and launch a festival... Now the best part, the goal of the community is making David Lynch the leader contributor for 2010... Good luck guys, my fingers crossed!
http://www.opensourcecinema.org/ This site is important for me... As you saw at the top, there are many examples of different parts of a "free film / open movie concept" however there were no concrete effort to make these cases a part of a new film making movement... OpenSourceCinema tries to do this... and you can see most of these examples and many other in there also...
P.S. One of our users Affan Taner (who studies film making and started to use FLOSS technologies recently) shot an advertorial for kdenlive, the video editor for KDE. You can watch it in YouTube! or download however you prefer...
Tags: Sinema InEnglish
