Tube Open Movie

Just a quick post to say I’m supporting Tube through Kickstarter.

poster for Tube, the Open Movie from urchn.org

Tube is an “Open Movie”, or open source film, directed by Bassam Kurdali (of Elephants Dream and Mancandy FAQ fame). Created using largely open source software, the elements of the film will be released under a creative commons license for anyone who wants to use them and learn from them. You can even reuse them as assets in your own projects.

Open movies are a great idea; no other production method allows you to see exactly how a film has been put together. You can watch any other movie as often as you want, listen to commentaries, watch making-of documentaries, all that stuff, but actually being able to open, analyse and disassemble the production files and assets is a real education – there’s no comparison. I have the entire content for the Blender Institute’s Big Buck Bunny and Sintel movies, and I’m still learning from them.

As I write this post, the $32,500 pledged so far means they’ve well exceeded their goal of $22,000, but they have a further target of $50,000, with 8 days left. If you’re interested in supporting this kind of project why not pledge something, even a dollar. $10 will get you a poster. $25 will get you a frame of the film.

Here’s the blurb from urchn.org, the organisation behind the film:

“A 3D animated short film based in libre software, Tube is also a new experiment in distributed collaboration. It plays on the ancient Gilgamesh poem, in a variant of the hero’s progress that becomes the animation’s own frames.”

And here’s the blurb from their Kickstarter page:

“Animation with substance. The crowd funds it, the crowd owns it. Tube is the experimental production of a 3D animated short about the dream and failure and achievement of immortality. It’s also a love letter to free software and open culture that marks their convergence with independent filmmaking.”