In 2004 my colleague and I released the 104 minutes Documentary/Road Movie „Route 66” under a Creative Commons License, also providing the footage for remixes. That quickly rose national interest in Germany and the movie became popular as one of the first Open Source films.
Within a year the movie was downloaded over a million times and spread on 600.000 DVDs. Universities, theaters, filmmakers and VJs started to use the footage for their own projects and Bechholds and I started the Open Source Film Netlabel vebfilm.net.

I have been working on the second feature film „The Last Drug” since then, with up to 20 Free Culture- & film enthusiasts joining me on this Open Source Science Fiction film project and I was also pretty busy representing our ideas on events related to Open Source, Net Culture and Digital Culture in Germany. With a $450,000 budget „The Last Drug” is the most expensive Open Source film so far and lots of artists (including us!) are curious about how this project will work out. The release is planned for this year. I'm also aiming to release our third production this winter: the Open Source Documentary Road Movie „Biker's Soul”.

Open Source & Free Culture

We will be active participants in a free culture of connectivity and production, made possible as it never was before by the Internet and digital technology, and we will fight to prevent this new potential from being locked down by corporate and legislative control. If we allow the bottom-up, participatory structure of the Internet to be twisted into a glorified cable TV service — if we allow the established paradigm of creation and distribution to reassert itself — then the window of opportunity opened by the Internet will have been closed, and we will have lost something beautiful, revolutionary, and irretrievable.
The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.
We release all movies under a Creative Commons License, that allows you to share, remix or reuse them, even commercially. Help us to show other artists that this freedom can work.

Remix, Free and Open Source Footage

If you are interested in remixing or looking for free footage - take a look at our new Open Source Film „The Last Drug”.
Several distributions of „The Last Drug” will be available: for filmmakers, (score) musicans, VJs and DJs. All of them will be licensed Creative Commons by-sa, which allows you to distribute or even sell your derivative works without any restrictions or licensing fees as long as you allow others this freedom too, by using the same Creative Commons license for your remix.

Photos

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Imprint

VEB FILM Leipzig · Stefan Kluge · stefan [ät] vebfilm [d0t] net · fon: +41 (0)43 5355235
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