Guest article from Open Source filmmaker Tim Baumann of the Valkaama Open Source film project

An important part of what the whole Open Source Movie thing is all about is to enable others to use the material we produce for their own purposes. And one really great example for such a usage of Valkaama is West Latta's tutorial on how to make a film score on audio tuts+. So let's shortly analyse why an Open Source Movie like Valkaama which uses an OS compatible license such as the Creative Commons by-sa is needed for people like West to safely use external clips in order to do such great stuff as film score tutorials.

Liberal licenses like the Creative Commons licenses you can apply in order to give others the freedom to use your own creative work within a safe legal framework. The license hereby clearly states the DO's and DON'Ts when it comes to handling the material. So why is an Open Source compatible Creative Commons license the best choice?

As you probably know there are 6 standard CC licenses which consist of one ore more of the following modules or conditions: by (Attribution), nc (Noncommercial), nd (NoDerivs) and sa (ShareAlike). If you now make some research you will quickly find out that most of the few free movies you can find on the web are using the condition nd, and almost all of them the condition nc. So why is that counterproductive for people like West? And furthermore, why he couldn't make his tutorial without access to the movie's sources?

First of all free movies licensed under nd conditions don't allow you to make any modifications to the material. Hence they are useless for any reuse, remix or mashup and... no tutorials with these. Second of all, the nc module is quite a trap. On the webpage West's tutorial is published it is possible to gain access to premium content (source files, bonus tutorials and more) by paying a monthly fee. Although this particular tutorial which uses scenes from Valkaama is freely accessible the fact that it is also offered within a commercial framework clearly infringes the nc term. The same applies to the small commercials displayed on the webpage.

Well, so much for the licenses... As for the sources, why exactly are they needed? The reason for this is quite simple, yet important: the source tracks containing the dialogues can be downloaded separately from our FTP Server. Since they aren't mixed with music yet, you can simply add another film score without having to separate voice and music before. A task which is nearly impossible by the way.

Resources:
- Tutorial "The Process of Score Composition" Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
- Tutorial videos on vimeo: First draft, Final score


Note: This version of scene 56 still has some color grading issues we're trying to fix in the forthcoming BETA of Valkaama.

(cc) by-sa valkaama.com