Opening Up Hollywood
If there is one thing that Open Source has proven is that a large group of organized and coordinated people can make incredible things happen. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge explore whether just because took on the big guns in the software world, could we do the same with the movie world?
Of course, we are the very start of the conversation! Do you think we could make a fully Open Source movie? Do you think we have the tools to do this? Do we have the creative and organizational abilities to do this? If this is possible, why hasn’t it happened? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below…
33 Comments to “Opening Up Hollywood”
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Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but you know about Sita Sings the Blues, right? Fully CC-BY-SA.
See http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues.
Yep. The topic of the shot is slightly different from that — not so much “can movies be made CC”, but “can a movie be made collaboratively”?
Also, you guys only ever talk about the collaborative process of making a film. That’s just one aspect of open source.
Another aspect is releasing the source when you release the code and permitting other people to re-use and adapt the source. That’s something that films could definitely do. Being able to see how something is done, being able to tinker with things and build on previous work — open source is as much about that as it is community collaboration.
Absolutely agree. I’d love to see more “open source” music that releases the individual tracks. http://remix.nin.com is a great example of building a community around exactly that.
jml, you could do that with a Creative Commons TV show — maintain a video archive that people could edit with their own scenes to make new episodes.
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/freedom/gsftv/
I think the utter lack of success of open source games is illustrative here. Yeah sure, there are a few decent open source games out there that are mostly clones of commercial games.
But there’s not been a single one on the order of “Braid” or “World of Goo”, a simple but fantastic game that I would recommend to anyone interested in computer games.
If such a project were to succeed, game or film, it would need a proper director, a mostly-benevolent dictator leading the project and making creative decisions. Probably an art director too to maintain a consistent style in a game or animated film. Then you’d need a bunch of people willing to take direction and work more like employees than typical open source contributors.
Short answer: no, the traditional open source model isn’t appropriate for a proper creative work.
I’m working on a simple Android-based RPG right now, and I’ll certainly put the code up on BitBucket soon, probably under the MIT license. And I’m benefiting enormously from public domain and CC assets out there: art, sound effects, and music. But it’s ultimately a one-man project, and I wouldn’t want to fight over design decisions with someone else.
Iron Sky is being created in a semi-communal way: http://www.ironsky.net/site/
I think this is the “community” site: http://www.wreckamovie.com/
The Wreckamovie site is more than just the community for Iron Sky. It’s a collaborative platform for… well, anyone who wants to make a film. If you click on the Productions tab you can see how the platform is being used and how many filmmakers are making use of it.
Interestingly enough, while you are completely correct about Elephants Dream and Big Buck bunny being private projects, the Blender Foundation is really opening up their latest film far more to communal building. Already they’ve had sprints where the community can contribute modelling, animation, the logo for the film and the modelling and texturing of one f the key props.
There seems to be a cautious experimentation over which parts can be done well by the community and which parts don’t seem to work so well. Generally though it looks very similar to what yo9u see in successful open source projects though. You have a couple of skilled people good at working with a team and inspiring a vision (Mark at Canonical, Ton at Blender) defining a general vision, and then relying on a small amount of paid help to co-ordinate the wider community and do the bits that the community doesn’t want to.
There are a lot of short 5 to 10 min open source movies.
There are major issues blocking longer. Most people fail to notice that Elephants Dream and Big Buck bunny both used render farms.
Current Sintel will be using home brew class cluster. 16 machines of grunt. That is way less than the 1000’s of machines used in the past.
Basically the power requirement has come back but it still more than a stock standard PC. With work on video card support could see 3d movie production reduced to a task a standard PC can do.
Their is not a single bit of closed source software being used in the Sintel production. 12 mins long does not sound like much. But that is over double the past blender movie projects.
So the foundations for open source movie production is being layed down.
Games in open source have also had lack of good models and other parts to work with. So even if the game is unique lot of cases it has lacked finish.
Distributed rendering wouldn’t be too difficult, no? I don’t know if anything like it exists at the moment, but you could wrap your code in the BOINC API and ask people to donate their idle resources. BOINC does support CUDA; I don’t know if it can use GPUs in other ways.
I think this touches on a broader concept, “git4poets” – distributed authoring for non-techs.
Wrap and specialize FLOSS tools for artists, activists and the like.
Where this happens behind a simple gui with buttons for basic operations: $ git clone:http://github.com/themovie/screenplay.git
…
Thanks, Kent
I want and think it is possible to have an ”open source world”
I am not going to use any of the political words used for the above as they have too much baggage.
But ye to a certain extent this happens with films, eternal sunshine… was one of the better movies i have ever seen and there are numerous other examples.
I am not sure what pixel core do per se – but if something like them were to spread to independent film makers and mixed this could easily expand via youtube or wherever..
I am a professional screenwriter by trade, and my answer is a big fat no.
When someone contributes code to a project they are making something run faster, or fixing a bug, or generally making a change than can be measured in simple terms ‘Does this make the code better Y/N?’. How would that work when it came to a screenplay? It is not a black and white thing that a change makes something better.
Also, different stages of the film making process have different requirements. Crowd sourcing feedback on a script might be possible, but what about the actual nuts and bolts of filming the thing? How can multiple people contribute telling the actor how they should play the scene without confusing the actor? How can multiple people contribute to deciding where the lights should go without grinding the whole production to a halt? (Everytime lights are moved it costs you 10s of minutes, if not hours to set up the shot again, that is why actors have trailers).
What about post production? If anyone in the world can see the release candidate of the final edit, then why would anyone pay to see the final movie? If your argument is the movie would have to be for free then that straight away limits the types of films which could ever be made this way because films are expensive to fund even if everyone works for free, and most people with talent wont want to work for free.
I’m not saying it would be impossible to make a film this way, in fact many already have, such as these fan made tribute movies to Star Wars and such like; but will this ever replace the traditional film making model? No.
Could it result in one or two really interesting, good films being made? Maybe, but only under the strict stewardship of talented artists who’s involvement would challenge the idea that it was an open process and not simply their film with a few ‘Special Thanks’ needed at the end of the credits.
I’m not saying your wrong, but I don’t agree with your argument.
An open source project doesn’t have to use everyone’s input, it just needs to be open to it. If you’re designing a user interface to an open source software product, just because it’s open source doesn’t mean it has to have all the buttons that are suggested on the screen. That’s why you always have some hierarchy in a community, so decisions can be made.
Compare this to your comment about direction. There’s no reason why you’d have a crowd of directors on set just because people want to contribute to the direction of the film. Contributors could meet to discuss direction ideas, with a “head of direction” who filters out the crap and uses his/her own expertise to do the actual direction on set.
If members of the direction team were unhappy with the final result, they’d be welcome to fork the project and do it their way, just as UI designers would if they didn’t like the resulting interface of a software product.
“Contributors could meet to discuss direction ideas, with a “head of direction” who filters out the crap and uses his/her own expertise to do the actual direction on set.”
Er… that is exactly how a regular film director works today.
Check out The Cosmonaut. The film is in pre-production at the moment but does look a lot like an open-source project.
Critically, the final film – as well as the raw footage, the soundtrack and any graphics or designs – will be released under a Creative Commons license.
The film has a website at: http://www.thecosmonaut.org/
Hey, a member of The Cosmonaut team here! I just want to clarify that The Cosmonaut is not really a collaborative film, which is the concept Jono was talking about in the podcast. However, as ExpatPaul said, everything will be released under a Creative Commons license. In fact, this Creative Commons thing is so important for us that we’re doing a bunch of contests, trying to encourage people to create derivate works and all that.
Cool! Can you talk a bit more about why you decided to go Creative Commons and what you’re hoping to get from it?
Sure! First of all, we all know content is losing value nowadays, so we’re charging for the experience rather than for the content itself. If we want people to go to the theater, buy DVDs and merchandise, and if we want to get TV networks interested in our movie, we need as much people as possible watching our movie. The combination of Creative Commons licenses + P2P, direct download, video on demand, etc allows that.
But our value-added differentiation approach goes far beyond that. We’re delivering a rich experience around the movie and many related content, giving people a lot of reasons and opportunities to pay for it: movie release parties, transmedia pieces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmedia_storytelling), ARGs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game), different kinds of derivative works… Of course, we’ll also offer the usual stuff like the aforementioned merchandise, standard and collector’s edition DVDs and so on.
Now, when it comes to participation, there’s no direct collaboration in the creative process (as I said in my first comment), but in the production process. There is a large team (which I am part of) helping in a lot of ways, we’ll use render farms for the post-production process and we’ll ask for help to promote, distribute and premiere the movie once it’s done. And even though we’re not following a collaborative process of creation, there is indeed some indirec) participation in this field. Since we’re releasing all our material under Creative Commons licenses, people are able to create derivative works (as I also said in my first comment, we’re actually encouraging that by doing contests). We, as creators, can decide whether we want to use those materials or not. In fact, our movie itself was inspired by a nice book called Poetics for cosmonauts.
As you can see, our project is surrounded by a lot of new concepts and ideas, so it’s hard for us to explain everything in just a few words. But I hope this comment answers your questions!
http://projectlondonmovie.com/
These guys are already doing it. http://projectlondonmovie.com/
Sorry for the double post. (sheepish grin)
I very, VERY strongly suggest you check out RiP: a Remix Manifesto
I agree with Jaco. Best documentary ever!
Talking about machinama you guys have to see clear skies: http://www.clearskiesthemovie.com/
Actually “open source” has gone from art to software rather than the other way around. I mean it’s the very definition of folklore if you think about it. It’s the corporations who try to put a stop to it in order to monetize on it.
The fact that we’re not seeing more widespread open source type things happening in movies probably has to do with the size of the projects and the costs. But as these things become more “affordable” I think that will change. I mean we’re already seeing it on youtube with people getting together to do interesting stuff.
I see people posting all these links but I wonder just how ‘open source’ the films actually are. There is a big difference between seeking like-minded people to work on a film together; and a process where for example you release all the raw unedited footage for anyone to download and do a weekly dump of your FinalCut Pro file so people can build the current official draft of the edit, where then different people could merge their different parts of the edit together, so if Bob has edited the ending better it could be added to Jane’s really kick ass middle section.
Simply saying on a website ‘We are making a movie, contact us if you want to work on it with us’ is NOT an open source development method. Even if you then release the final film under a CC license. That is simply using the internet to hire your crew, who happen to be doing the work for free.
An open source development process is exactly as I am describing above, where anyone can download all the assets at any point and can ‘patch’ parts of the film.
I just think the tools arent there at the moment. If you look at Mac which is full of film makers they have final cut pro and that is insanely good. We just dont have that kind of tool. Pitivi and Openshot do work but not to the standard of good film making programs on Mac.
That being said the idea of an open film is kinda nice. Allowing people off the street contribute to something cool is always nice.
i think project london is a great example of “opensource” movie making, a team of people all over the world contributing to make a great film on a virtually 0 dollar budget. they use blender for the 3d parts and it just looks amazing.
In principle, a group of programmers who never meet could create a world-beating app for no budget. A film, however, needs locations, sets and props. These all need serious money. Where would it come from?
Without somebody clearly in command to provide the vision, a fictional film would quickly get lost. It’d be a bit like a novel where a different author writes each chapter. Everyone would have made a valuable contribution but no contributor would be satisfied with the outcome.
I think the only real scope for films created on the open source model might be documentaries where the funding requirements are much less, and contributors with a common viewpoint can each provide their own angle. In fact I’d go as far as to say that a documentary with multiple contributors could actually be more interesting and objective than one created by a single director.
Till Eulenspiegel Blender is using Distributed rendering.
Issue is amount of data that has to move between machines while processing to keep sync between renders ie so two different parts of the render color match up and shape of explosions and so on. The machines basically have to be in 1 building. You are talking many gigs if not teras of data that has to move between the machines in a distributed render. Yes a machine may need to receive over 10 gb of data just to be able to render 1 frame. BOINC API just will not cut it. Now breaking a frame down into smaller maths segments does not work well either. You will basically eat your internet connection alive. Reason why its very much upload to render farm 1 complete set of data let it render then download. Volume of data without allowing for percentage of failure is insane basically so impossible for BOINC to help with.
Beeza Props and location solution 3d set. Ok open source doing a real world movie might never happen. Blender getting good enough that rendered movies exist full length from the open source world is on the cards. Particularly if they can get the movie grade render real time on a fairly standard PC due to using video card. Currently blender mostly uses CPU.
At 16 machines you stand a chance of finding a school computer room or something else you can lend big enough now todo a movie render now. At a few 1000 it was basically impossible.
Blue screen stunts and the like can be done as well so actors don’t have to be in the one place.
Open source model has what we call dictators for life. These when producing a movie you would call director. If you read most books of movies then compare to movies very few line up.
Open source production would be no different.
Yes the big problem is tools. Everyone must have the same tools or a open source project cannot work either. Tools is the first and most important part. Blender is almost there. final cut pro equal tool is embed inside blender.
Blender can do everything bar audio editing out box. Skinning can be nicer in gimp but it does not have to be done there. Audio alignment to video blender can do. Ie effects on audio it cannot.
So Blender can be used for a 3d movie or video taken movie or a mixure of the 2. It can also be used to create the game that goes along with the movie. Then used to design the toys to go along with the movie.
Basically everything you need about a modern day movie blender can help produce. It very much becoming the office suit of movie production.
I think some people have a view of open source where everything has to be open in the development of the original project. If there was a foundation for funding the money, of film projects, then you could possibly have capital to fund these projects. Most programs are usually started by a few people, and then are polished by others. I would see film doing the same thing. A few people would start the project from writing a story, to directing, so that you a unified vision. From there the community, would supply actors, crew, and such to work on the film. There could be a select group who have editing rights, as well as helping with the soundtrack, but the director would still have some say in the direction of the film, much like someone who would control the project.
Part of your audience is people who worked on the project and their families. As far as leaking the film before it is complete, it may be impossible to stop, but in general, most people are not going to download the movie first. They wait on the movie companies to tell them what is good. The biggest problem is going to be creating some kind of distribution company to get this movie into theaters. That is where the biggest hurdle will be. Overall it could be very doable.
I came across this site, full of opensource movies – but more of the instructional type. http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_movies