Category: Life

So the site for the Piracy Documentary is now up! Check it out at:
www.piracydocumentary.com

I was able to design the site from scratch in under two hours. This is thanks in large part to NVU, an open-source Dreamweaver equivalent. The learning curve is also pretty shallow: before I installed it less than two hours ago, I had never dealt with a WYSIWYG editor other than the horrid Frontpage.

That said, the program does pitch in bits of illogical/useless code. However, its very minimal, and easy to clean up. Worth a gander.

Got in contact with the people over at CTV. It would cost me more than my entire budget to license 20 seconds worth of footage. Therefore, I dropped it [the footage was going to originally serve as the intro to the doc]. Also dropping some other footage taken from G4|TechTV on Magnatune. It was of poor quality, and the licensing would be just as exhorbitant.

That also means that I can now release the film under Creative Commons, *as long as people cannot modify it and release it publicly* [why can’t they? See previous post. Essentially, it would be illegal for me to do so.] Will I release it under the CC? I just might, due to the initial marketting advantages it will give me, plus access to Magnatune’s music. This might be a godsend in disguise.

I’ll aim for my own in-house footage. Oh and my bank called – this film has driven me officially broke. But I’m so close to finishing it that I’ll keep doing it ’till its done.

As the interviews draw to a close, I’m faced with a difficult dilema:

To go Creative Commons, or not to.

Here’s why this is an issue. I have so far contacted 36 corporate/governmental/individual entities. These people have given me permission to film them, or on their location (well not all – see a few posts back). They’ve given me this permission knowing that the film would be distributed. If I release it CC, and someone plays with the video and releases another version out, then they’d have to get permission from all those people too to release their film. Even though this is their problem, I’d be seen as a conduit to promote some kind of infringement. I have no qualms people playing with my video – in fact I want this to go public domain in 5 years.

That’s assuming I don’t use any copyrighted materials in the movie of course. I was in the midst of negotiating with CTV and G4TechTV to get some footage of theirs on my film. If I release this under the CC, I cannot use any copyrighted materials like that at all. That’s because I would become a conduit of copyright infringement, as it would be illegal for others to re-release the film without first getting permission from those TV corps. (Yet under the CC lisence I’d have, others can re-distribute – you can see how I would be the one pursued here.)

And another issue: distribution. If I go CC, or even mention public domain, then my hopes of distributing the film via the National Film Board are scrapped. If I don’t go CC, I can’t use the music I have from Magnatune for the initial non-commercial stage of this film. This music is a big key to the film. Your thoughts?

Either way I’m screwed.

Even though I’m only halfway through the interviews, I put up a sneak peak to show you what’s been done so far.

You can see the full screens here. Now keep in mind that this is all raw footage: the brightness, contrast, and colour balance will all be edited for the final release.Release date is April 1st.

I’ve updated the website backend. WordPress has been upgraded to version 2.0, and I replaced the Invisionboard Forums with the Open-Source k4BB [k4bb.org].

The biggest thing I’ve noticed with the move to WordPress 2.0 is the WYSIWYG editor. Finally – no need for lots of HTML coding if I want something to look a certain way. It also features a few nifty graphical updates. The transition was extremely painless – you write over the old files with the new install, and use a certain special upgrade PHP page. That’s it. I’m also planning to do a few tweaks to the Mambo frontend. Namely adding an RSS feed for the forums.

Update: Ran into serious issues with k4BB, and will have to reinstall it. Looks like the db got corrupted. Meanwhile, I’m back to the old software.

Update – Feb 21: Fixed WordPress bug. You can now post comments again!