Open Source Cinema starting to look promising

I have been checking in periodically on the Open Souce Cinema project for a while. With some skepticism, i must admit, because however good the idea may be, I know how time consuming opening up can be even with even the simplest projects. Sharing large video files, building a community around your content, and constantly remixing is just .. tedious - not least if you are busy with other projects, don't have enough money to work on the same project for several years (or rich donors/patrons etc). If I remember right, this team actually hired a brasilain film crew scattershooting away, at the iCommons iSummit in Rio back in ´06. Obviously, we would have spent our whole budget before getting started with a similar approach!

Anyway - there are some interesting, bold statements in the manifesto, such as

3) Film is Fascism!

The traditional approach to creating films, especially documentary films, is flawed. A single perspective cannot hope to capture the nuance of an evolving cultural debate. Sure, Point of View is important. But "The Ecstasy of Influence", the participatory nature of digital creativity, begs us to create media that invites input from its audience.

and some really interesting battles with the romantic genius idea that still roams in the film world - one man, one vision, etc.

But when it comes to this project - up until now I haven't really seen anything that impressed me - and since this project was long underway when we started working on Good Copy Bad Copy, I thought to myself this may just fork and fork into oblivion while parts of the subject matter became obsolete. Digital reveries that would never end up solid and .. err .. viewable.

But now, take this live recording of Girltalk:


and have a look at this remix (give it 15 seconds to get started),

"created by all the students in COMS274 Intermedia I, Dept of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Fall 2007. Working in Flash, all 64 students rotoscoped 1-3 seconds of video each, over a period of three weeks. (Most of them had never used Flash before.)

We were inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (as seen in Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and our readings and class discussions about copyright and creativity."

I will be checking back more often and hope the best for this project. I have been doing a series of interviews on danish radio on DYI filmmaking and collaborative filmmaking, and this could be next stop :)