GADE

What is Free Culture?

This is a little video I made mostly for more editing practice, but also to answer the question "What is Free Culture?" and to give a little bit of the context, reasons, and practical economic side of the idea. A lot of people recoil when they hear the words to Nina Paley's "Copying Is Not Theft" song -- which frankly is a little surprising to anyone with any experience with free software or free culture, because it's really a very non-controversial point, and of course, it's fundamental to the idea of Free Culture.

So I decided to pivot on that; include a few words from some free-software and free-culture luminaries; and lead into the question of what this means for artists and how it is that people can still make money making art in a free-culture world -- and finally, to show some of the projects that are have recently been produced or are in production now.

And I think it's valid to address the economics so early, because if there were no way to produce free culture economically, then that would make it unsustainable, and that would be a real showstopper (kind of literally). But it turns out that it's not really so hard, because fans are more supportive than that.

I may make more remixes like this, to expound on the ideas further, but I just wanted to give a small taste of free culture here (and keep it short).

Of course, if you find this subject interesting, you may want to look up some of the source videos it's based on:

I also heartily encourage you to follow the film projects I reference:

CC By-SA 4.0

Object and camera tracking in Blender 2.49.

This is the resulting animation from my Free Software Magazine tutorial Object and Camera Path Tracking in Blender: Monkey See Monkey Do(FSM).

CC By-SA 3.0

Demonstration of sound effects created by painting spectra in Gimp and converting with the "Advanced Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph" (ARSS).

This is a loop created from the "NinaVision" collection of animations by Nina Paley.

To be used as a main menu loop on the DVD I made from them. The animations are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike by Nina Paley. This video edit is by Terry Hancock, under the same license.

See my tutorial article, Making a videoloop with Kino and Audacity for how this was made, and my tutorial article, Mastering a DVD using QDVDAuthor for how it was used.

The media files for the DVD and an ISO are available from the NinaVision on Internet Archive.

I liked Jonathan Mann's performance of "Copying Isn't Theft", but it was not an exact match to Nina Paley's animation. Here I've simply tweaked the video using Kino to match up the lipsync to Mann's singing. This is maybe my 2nd or 3rd Kino edit, but I don't think it's too awfully bad.

As the credits say, the work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.

The original animation version has much higher production values -- mine is just a quick mock-up.

And there is a video of Jonathan Mann's original soundtrack.

And here's a video of Nina Paley singing this version of the song a capella.

Couldn't find the exact original that Jonathan Mann used -- it might not be on YouTube, but the version above is very similar. Paley rearranged the words slightly (to "Copying is not theft" instead of "Copying isn't theft"), and Mann added the "Ah-ooh". So his version can't really be matched to Nina's video without some edits, which is why I created this. I just wanted to see what it would look like.

I find it remarkable how controversial this simple observation is -- it's a fundamental property of information products that they cannot be "stolen" in the same way that material things can. This does not mean there are not reasonable discussions to be had about remuneration for intellectual labor, but to compare copying to stealing is to fundamentally confuse the issue -- and of course some very powerful political lobbies have been trying to do just that. Which is the reason why Paley created this song and this video in the first place.

A 10-minute overview of the production and development work I did for "Lunatics!" and related projects in 2021.

Happy New Year!

This is a simple demonstration and rigging test animation for a 14-segment display prop in Blender. It can display a choice of 22 messages (if you design them not to overlap, you could even do multiple messages at once). This is more than enough for the applications I need it for, and it doesn't require a script to support it. Relies on the "DSEG" font package from www.keshikan.com, which is packaged for Debian as the 'fonts-dseg' package, under the SIL Open Font License.

This was created for a close-up shot of a control panel in the pilot episode of "Lunatics!", "No Children in Space", though I anticipate reusing the display or at least the design later.

Screencast logs of April, sorted out by project:

38.6 hrs on "Lunatics!" Production: mainly the "LA-Launch" and "SF-SoyuzFlight" sequences, and then constructing a new whole-episode animatic.

25.3 hrs on Anansi Blender Extensions add-on (ABX): this month, I extensively modified the "Copy NLA" feature which has now become "Copy Animation"; and I expanded the "L.Ink Compos" feature into "Ink/Paint Config", with options for handling transparency, billboard objects, and fixing the sky background compositing.

15.1 hrs on Lib-Ray media format: setting up unit and functional tests and creating a small test article video to use in more tests. Also came up with a plan for how to integrate visual testing (I had some visual testing working a long time back, but I got the test code muddled up with the application code pretty badly -- a lot of my current reorganization is just trying to sort that out).

3.0 hrs on collecting the codes for automating the robotics on a Primera Bravo II disk publisher that I purchased recently. I put this under a new project "Bunsen", which is very experimental right now, but I might be writing about it -- it's a studio utility to run disk burning on my file server through a web interface from my workstation. It's sort of a learning project, but I also hope to put it to use publishing short runs of M-Disc DVDs or other optical disk archives.

Regard sur… Qui es-tu Lucio ?

SPOILERS!

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This is the first time in a long time that I have assembled the full episode at once, and it also represents a substantial improvement in my Kdenlive workflow, since I'm using some new features to put everything together.