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You have just spent months working on your latest animated short. Hours and hours of work bent over a computer, pouring out your technical and creative heart, and finally it is finished. It is ready for distribution. Your next step is to put the animation on your website for people to download for free. After that you put the software you used to create it online, along with the production files, script, music and extras such as a documentary about the making of your animation. You provide all of this for free. However, despite giving it all away for nothing, you are also hoping to sell a couple of thousand DVDs...Welcome to the world of open-source media.
'Open-source' is a term originally used to describe the development process of software. In open-source software development, the program code (akin to the blueprints) of the project is laid bare for anybody to download, examine, test, correct and improve. They then add their altered version back into the mix and so on. This seemingly chaotic process can produce some impressive results: the Open Office suite, the Firefox web-browser and the Apache Web Server (on which around 90% of the Internet sits) to name but a few. Since its inception within software development, use of the term has grown. It can be used to describe any project where the development is an open process, with Wikipedia being the best known, non-software open-source example. As can be seen by our example above, the ideas and methods of open-source are becoming firmly established within the media world as well and could change both how we consume, and produce media, forever.
 Elephants Dream is a five minute animated film telling the story of two characters, Emo and Proog and the surreal world in which they live. The film is widely considered to be the first ever 'open-film' project that has resulted in the animation, along with its associated software and production materials being made freely available for download. But how important were open-source ideas to the film makers? The film's producer Ton Roosendaal sets the record straight; "Without that [open-source] element there wouldn't have been a project even." Ton remarks that the film has, to date, clocked up over 500,000 downloads and sales of 2400 DVDs. "I'm very happy with the reviews we got so far; luckily the movie was perceived as a professional quality product, and reviewed based on comparisons with what the big studios come up with." Roosendaal thinks open-source media is going places, "There's clear signals that this approach works well, and creates excitement and involvement of a lot of people, also from producers and sponsors. That might enable us to set up a next project based on larger targets." If you think that it is only the more technical areas of media production that are going open-source you would be mistaken. Journalism is going open-source too. Back in October 1999, Jane's Intelligence Review ("the international journal of threat analysis") solicited feedback, for an article about Cyberterrorism it planned to publish, from the major geek website Slashdot ("news for nerds"). The army of vocal and knowledgeable contributors who read and contributed to Slashdot promptly took the article apart. So much so in fact, that the editor declared he would no longer publish the original, but would write a new version which could be used to pay the Slashdot contributors whose words made it into the final version. Writing about this episode for the online journal Salon, Andrew Leonard noted, "Just as open-source programmers would critique a beta release of software filled with bugs, the Slashdot readers panned the first release of Jane's journalistic offering, and the upgrade, apparently, will be quick to follow.
There's an immense amount of expertise out there on the Net, sites like Slashdot are pioneering new territory as they facilitate access to that knowledge, to the great and lasting benefit of us all. To describe this process Leonard coined a new term, 'Open-source journalism'. In his Salon article Leonard muses, "The main thing that has changed since 1999 has been the explosion of the blogosphere [the mass of blogs], which I like to view as one giant, nearly infinite, exercise in open-source journalism. There used to be a distinction between journalists and the people they interviewed, but now everyone is part of the conversation -- a New York Times journalist writes a story about economic affairs, and a hundred economists tear it apart online, and we all learn more from this than we would have in the past." As for the 'source' within the 'open-source' idea? "Access to the source material is not what I meant specifically, though I suppose it comes closer to the essence of the open-source software development methodology."
The film and music industries have had a love/hate relationship with the open-source movement for many years. Film executives must have snarled with rage when Jon Lech Johansen, aka 'DVD Jon', released his open-source project, DeCSS: its source code also happened to reveal how DVD encryption could be countered. As a result of this, he was taken to court twice and acquitted twice over the same issue. In contrast, others from the music and film industries are positivity embracing the ideas behind open-source. Brighton based record label, Loca Records, sells its music on CD, vinyl and MP3 as you might expect. But it also releases all of its music under a copyleft license, meaning its listeners have carte-blanche to copy and re-mix their music. Does this mean the label will not be commercially successful? Loca's David Meme responds, "We are doing very well. For any small independent record label in the UK it can be very difficult to get distribution and get the records in the shops...like any small label, it is the buzz from constant creativity that makes it all worthwhile, not the boring PR and marketing that eventually sucks away your soul trying to get the bands photograph in a Sunday supplement or something."
 Over in Buenos Aires, the ideas behind open-source are brought to the big screen as a feature length animated film: Plumiferos. The tale of Juan the sparrow, Feifi the canary and their adventures; the everyday story of what happens seven feet above our heads. Gustavo Giannini, the films executive producer is in no doubt where the project is aiming to go, "We expect that this project will be profitable, and this is the idea to demonstrate that the open-source software is not only a software for university students, nerds or hackers; is a serious tool to generate industry." This is both a big, and transnational project; it is supported by Intel Argentina, has technical support from programmers in Finland, Canada, Netherlands and Spain plus, Giannini says, that Warner Bros are expressing an interest in distribution.
The rise of open-source media can be seen to mirror wider changes in the industry. In part it heralds the end of the hierarchical, one-way relationship between media producer and audience. People can now really own the means of media production, from DV cameras to photo-mobiles, they have access to a major distribution channel - the Internet; and they intend to use it. Leonard notes, "I first got a sense of this in the mid-90s when writing for Salon and other Web publications, the immediate critiques I received from readers improved my personal process of reporting." This process can be seen as an echo of the self-referential nature of media; cutting, pasting and re-mixing itself. Meme remarks, "We think that it is very important for creativity and sampling to be able to re-use music and so are very happy for others to try to be creative with our catalogue." It is the result of technology that offers a dynamic, fluid, almost living form of media, that may well supersede the static, singular version we have become accustomed to over recent years...
Further InformationElephants Dream
http://www.elephantsdream.org
Loca Records
http://www.locarecords.com
Open-Source Journalism
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/1999/10/08/geek_journalism/
Steal This Film
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/
Plumiferos
http://www.plumiferos.com |
