Brett Gaylor
Interview Transcript:
Brett Gaylor: My name is Brett Gaylor and I directed a film called "RiP: A Remix Manifesto." It's a film I made over the course of about six years actually and kind of the thing that I tried to do all the way through the production of the film was to try and involve the audience in the creation of the actual film. I mean the film is about remix culture, right? It's about this kind of tension between participatory media and copyright law because of course people are using copyrighted images to express their culture and this whole war that's been going on over the last 10 years is sort of directly affecting that and I felt it's not getting us anywhere. So, it's a pretty strong viewpoint film, "A Remix Manifesto." It's not a remix chat. Right from the beginning, I had a website called opensourcecinema.org and as I was shooting, I would put my rushes and sort of works in progress on this site under a CC license. So, what that allowed me to do is to let the audience know that they can participate in the film. They can use my footage however they want, but I want them to submit it back to the site as well so that I can include it in the final film. So, then I would start to edit these into the film during the editing process and sort of do like a call and response with the audience. So, at some points in the film they kind of take over and it's their part of the film and then I'm back, you know? That's how I decided to do it, sort of a structured open source sort of experiment.
Steve Garfield: Okay. So, how do people see the footage, grab it and send it back to you? Like sometimes footage is kind of big. I mean how do you do that. What software?
Brett Gaylor: That's a good question because right when I started doing this, there was no real option for that. It was just basically peer to peer. They would post something and at some point, I might ask them for a higher resolution or I would just eat the bandwidth and download it, but now what I've done since the film has been released is I'm working with a company called Kaltura to integrate onto Open Source Cinema web-based editing. So, it can actually take place on the web using your browser. You don't have to have Final Cut Pro or iMovie or whatever the PC folks use. You don't have to have that stuff. You can just do right on the browser. So, that takes care of that kind of part of the question.
Steve Garfield: Oh, that's cool.
Brett Gaylor: What's cool about Kaltura is that they keep a reference to your high resolution one and what happens online is almost like an EDL. So, you can always point back to the original high resolution version.
Steve Garfield: That's neat. So, if people want to find out about this project and the movie, what URL, where would you send them?
Brett Gaylor: Opensourcecinema.org.
Steve Garfield: Okay, great. Thank you.
Brett Gaylor: Thanks Steve.
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