Open Source Movies & Animations, Remixable Films & the Mash-up Culture

Posted on June 26, 2009
Filed Under art, collective intelligence, community, creative commons, creativity, online collaboration, online video, social media, video | View Comments

Elephants Dream from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

The Open philosophy as applied to movies & animations deals with three related concepts:

open, collaborative projects maintained by a community;
open source software;
the copyleft / public domain side of the digital rights spectrum.

In regards to the first issue, a good starting point could be just watching a video called “RIP: A remix Manifesto“.
It’s basically a documentary film about copyright and remix culture. Everyone can contribute to the film, and follow the conversation on the Open Source Cinema site, & on social networks like Twitter & Facebook.

Open Source Cinema hosts also others on-going projects, driven by the community, inspired by the mash-up culture and the sharing philosophy.

Another source for re-mixable films and related tools is MOD Films, that also has some points on game-making and the Semantic Web. As stated on their website:

The films of tomorrow may be successful for one of an increasingly broad set of reasons. Story world creators who allow the networked audience to re-absorb the artistry, power and entertainment value of films may well be the first to harness the next phase of the Internet – the Semantic Web – a Web flush with new context and new opportunities for cross-pollination. For film-makers, game makers and their combined audiences, this could be a new age of story-telling.

Also be sure to check StrayCinema if you’re interested, an actual example of an open source film: you can download not only the movie but even the raw footage directly from the web site, so you can make your own version of it.

Among the many others, you can point to Upstage and FreeCinema.

As for the software choice, I find Blender quite interesting, a free open source 3D content creation suite, available under the GNU General Public License.

“Elephants Dream”, defined as the “world’s first 3d animated open movie”, was made with this software, and it’s available for watch and download here, along with the production files used to make it – 7 Gb – thus allowing the movie to be remade.

All these Open Projects are meant to prove an important concept in my opinion: professional movie production/animation can be actually accomplished with a very straightforward “open” philosophy, copyleft-related, DRM-free, using only open source software.

What do you think about that?
For any feedback or information to share, just post in the comments below.

Comments

adasport

An exelent video, is wonderful, I like this post...
Thanks
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The question is this: Did we, the public, cause this through our methodically waning sophistication, or is it a result of undiscerning corporations realizing that with enough marketing dollars they can get anybody to see anything, effectively disposing of the necessity to have a quality picture to make money?
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Like the Open Source software its good to have Open source movies which we can tweak to our needs and maybe earn some moeny of them.
diegomorelli

I do think so.