Beautiful Full Length Movie Released under Creative Commons | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful Full Length Movie Released under Creative Commons

sitasingstheblues.com

50 pointssmanek7 comments

The movie has a rave review from Ebert http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/having_wonderful_tim....

The creator is also accepting donations, to help cover the creation costs (especially for the song licensing fees) at http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution.

And a direct link to the downloads: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/wiki/index.php?title=SitaSi... You can get it in up to 1080P with completely free codecs. I love this women.

I think it would have been wiser for the creator to wait until she had DVDs ready to sell (a few more weeks) before releasing this movie. I'll bet a lot of people (myself included) loved the movie and would be happy to shell out $10-$20 for a DVD to support her, but could forget about it in a few weeks.

I also liked this quote from the home page:

The old business model of coercion and extortion is failing. New models are emerging, and I'm happy to be part of that. But we're still making this up as we go along. You are free to make money with the free content of Sita Sings the Blues, and you are free to share money with me. People have been making money in Free Software for years; it's time for Free Culture to follow.

* would be happy to shell out $10-$20 for a DVD to support her, but could forget about it in a few weeks.*

well, burn your own DVD and donate now before you forget :)

This is an amazing movie. I just watched it in its entirety.

I just watched it with a friend who is a film maker (has done some Radiohead DVD films among other impressive work.) It sparked a discussion about business models from an artist's perspective. Still mulling the implications of our discussion so no conclusions yet, sorry.

Oh, it helps (for me at least) that it is the story of the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu text from the Vedas. Amazing!

Ramayana is not "from" the Vedas. Vedas predate Ramayana.

However, "Bhagavadgeetha", which is popularly* considered to be the holiest of Hindu texts is from Mahabharatha, which takes place after Ramayana.

* I say popular because there is no universal agreement on Bhagavadgeetha to be canonical source of Hindu philosophy and religion. However, it has a very good condensation of the teachings of various hindu philosophical schools which can be understood with comparatively less study than the Vedas, the Vedanta and other bodies of knowledge.

Wow... I saw this movie a few weeks ago when a friend interviewed Nina Paley and she gave him a copy of the DVD. She was lamenting the fact that she couldn't get funding to buy rights to use the great 20s music in the film. What a pleasant surprise to see this turn up on HN!

Incidentally, I saw this the day after watching Coraline in 3D, and I liked Sita MUCH better. The animation, graphics, "multithreaded" storyline, and music are captivating. Less can be more (speaking to the complexity of graphics, etc).

I recommend it heartily!

> Less can be more (speaking to the complexity of graphics, etc).

It's true, in fact this is one of the core values that Matt Groening (creator of the Simpsons/Futurama) holds as he's written about before.

It's especially true of 2D (cel) animation.

I watched this (more from a technical interest in tools used than anything)

I'm guessing she used either Toon Boom Studio (I doubt she used Developer, there doesn't seem to be much interpolation between frames) or perhaps Flash?

I'd still bet money on Toon Boom as the phonemes in the Lip Syncs appear as if they were automated, plus the Cut-Out animation style she used is easily doable in either Toon Boom or Flash.

Anyway, Good to see more people releasing content under Creative Commons :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com