Open Source Cinema is Ready For Its Close-up

If you've been to the movie theater lately and thought, "I can do better than that," now's your chance. Open Source Cinema is inviting the FOSS community to get involved a project surrounding its first movie, RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

The documentary, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License has been six years in the making and takes up the cause of digital technology and copyright laws. Brett Gaylor, the film's director, says, "RiP explores the robber barons and revolutionaries squaring off across this new frontier as the film journeys from the hallways of Washington to the favelas of Brazil. Our central protagonist is Gregg Gillis, the Pittsburgh biomedical engineer who moonlights as Girl Talk, a mash-up artist rearranging the pop charts’ DNA with his incongruous entirely sample based songs."

The movie includes comments from Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, culture critic Cory Doctorow, and people whose lives have been impacted by the increasingly constraining copyright laws.

The documentary is nearly complete except for the ending, which is where the filmmakers want the open source community to step in. They say that since the future of copyright and culture is in a constant state of flux, so, too, should be the end of the movie. They are inviting people to download an assortment of film and music from the Web site, create a unique remix, then upload it to be considered for inclusion in the final ending.

If you're not quite ready to collaborate on a feature-length film, Open Source Cinema members are encouraged to contribute media projects of their own for collaboration or remixing. Who knows, maybe someday we'll see an Oscar category for Best Open Source Motion Picture.