Emrah Özesen is an interesting photographer who started his journey when he was in high school and used photography to dive into journalism during his college years, which were quite tempered politically. Later on, Özesen became a national athlet in Kayaking, where he documented numerous rivers in and out of Turkey both with wild landscapes and seeing the challange of man versus nature through his objective...

It is not so easy to live as an artist (or even as an athlete as long as you are not a member of national football team) in Turkey, so most of the photograph artists are also working as commercial photographers or take different professions and spare time for their passion. This situation makes any conceptual project quite valuable, sometimes even luxury for artists...

Özesen, politely donated 8 different pictures of his latest work which he made with jugglers. Following our motto, ...for freedom, Özesen chose Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-ND license to publish these great pictures. I would like to thank him personally by this note, where I also owe him an apology for writing this so late, approx. 1 month later than the release... Anyway... Thanks buddy, keep going so we can see much more...

The beta version of the last update release of Pardus 2007 is ready... We dedicate 2007.3 Beta to Gürer Özen who was one 

of the oldest developer working in Tubitak since last month. Gürer-San decided to kick-off his plans to conqueror the world 

and he's so busy with the invasion plans. 

"Pardus 2007.3 beta" and "Pardus 2007.3 live beta" versions present 

a massive update and package additions to the version 

2007.2 Caracal caracal version released on July, 11. In order to 

download live or installable versions incorporating many 

features including KDE 3.5.8, OpenOffice, k3b, Xorg, please click on 

the following links:

Check out ftp servers for ISO's   

ftp://ftp.pardus.org.tr/pub/pardus/kurulan/2007.3-Beta/

ftp://ftp.pardus.org.tr/pub/pardus/calisan/2007.3-Beta/

Please remember that this is a beta version which may be buggy or 

unstable. So please inform us if you see any problems... 

You can mail us or use bugzilla @ http://bugs.pardus.org.tr

Blender Foundation announced the second open movie project of Blender community: Peach... Similar to the Orange project, the targets are listed as:

1) Use Blender and other Free and Open Source software to create a compelling industry quality short 3D animation movie.
2) Stimulate and and facilitate further development of Blender.
3) Release the movie and studio database freely licensed  as Creative Commons.

This open movie concept is a big chance for free software model in order to produce softwares for artistic needs... Artist and developer collaboration would never be this fun and successful... Good luck people!

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...