At the Libre Planet conference in Boston/Cambridge earlier this year, we saw the premiere of Patent Absurdity, a great new documentary on patent issues in software. The film offers a succinct account of the risk to culture posed by Intellectual Property law’s recent metastasis. And– it has animation done in Blender by pal, Chris Webber. You can watch it here.
And me!
Connecticut Film Festival has a strong FLOSS representation since last year- they have multiple presentations on using Free Software to produce films, games or other interactive media. Last year I presented Blender workshops along with Jason Van Gumster, this year I’m going again. If you’re close to Danbury CT, come by.
Elephants Dream, 05.05.10 – 3:15 pm,05.09.10 – 2:00 pm
Big Buck Bunny 05.05.10 – 3:15 pm,05.09.10 – 2:00 pm
My workshop about making Tube with Free Software 05.06.10 – 1:00 pm
Other Free/Open Source related presentations about video production, audio, rosegarden,copyleft, open office, free software design and much more.
On Thursday, March 25th at 5:30 we’ll give a presentation at the Hampshire GLUG (GNU Linux User Group) in the East Lecture Hall on campus. We’ll screen the teaser and Elephants Dream, talk about Open Movie projects, about the CG Incubator Space and Tube. I plan on showing images and video from the production (including sikrit unreleased stuff!!!! )
Being me, I’ll probably end up spending some or most of the time showing some Blender 2.5 goodies, especially where they affect our production- so those interested in using Blender for their own work, or users of older versions who haven’t made the switch and want a first time look might enjoy.
If you live close by, please come, the event is open to all (not just members of the glug) and we even have free food, provided by Fresh Side Cafe in Amherst.
At the Bit Films blog, our compadre Chris Perry has posted multi-stage details of his cool project to create a Digital Cinema Package for The Incident at Tower 37.
DCP is the digital cinema distribution format, delivered via hard drives which plug directly into theater projectors. Realizing that “we’re really just talking about some fancy conversions to a non-proprietary format,” rather than resorting to expensive commercial solutions, Chris set out to mine the resources free/libre software offers the independent filmmaker.
Bassam’s small contribution was to cry “FFmpeg!” when Chris wished, “If only there was a tool to automatically output PNGs from a QuickTime movie…”
Check out the climax and how-to, or head to the beginning for Making a DCP, Part 1.
