Here's a recent post on open source cinema by Angela Watercutter from Wired.com:
With all the recent buzz about the collabo of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino for Grindhouse (if you haven’t seen it yet, go now, we’ll wait), I got to thinking about collaboration and how in it’s own way Grindhouse is actually kind of a remix of movies and styles: two directors with two very different films, trailers from even more eclectic/random sources, a guy humping Thanksgiving dinner, a stuntwoman playing a stuntwoman and a lot of ass-kickery all mixed into an homage to '60s and '70s cinema that is kind of about the quality of that very genre of cinema. It’s all so very meta. And it got me thinking, has anyone ever remixed their film? Sure, people take films and mix them with other source material. But has anyone ever started by open sourcing their film with the intent of putting out the remix as the final product? A quick Google search lead to some kids at NYU who encouraged people to take the blessed geek trilogies and remix them into 5-8 minute short parodies, but better still I found Open Source Cinema. Created by director Brett Gaylor it’s a “documentary project to create a feature film about copyright in the digital age” according to the manifesto. What Gaylor has done is conduct interviews with remix icons like Lawrence Lessig, Bonde do Role and Negativland’s Mark Hosler amongst many others and is inviting pretty much anyone to remix his material and/or add their own. He’s even wiki’d the film’s script. The docu he (and maybe even you!) is making is tentatively titled Basement Tapes and set to be released in March 2008. It’s being co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and EyesteelFilm. And, of course, Gaylor’s working with Creative Commons. If that wasn’t enough, he appropriated a (in)famous Banksy image for the project’s logo. Now that’s meta.
Read the original article (complete with lots of embedded links) here
