 Okay. Okay. All right, our next speaker is Matt Lee, who's gonna tell us about freely licensed movies with freely licensed tools. I am. Oh, I hit the apply button. There we go, sorry. Computers, how do they work? Okay. Cool, there we go. Okay, there we go, cool. Sorry for the hiccup. All right, so I am Matt Lee. I've been doing free software for a very long time. Worked for a while at GitLab, several years at Creative Commons, and at the Free Software Foundation. And I currently work for a company called Boku, and I work now testing web standards. Using free software since the early 90s, and for a long time, I was a canoe developer. And nowadays I spend most of my time making movies. This is Donald. Donald works at the FSF, some of you might know Donald. During the summer of 2011, when Bob was my intern, Donald and I saw something that gave us an idea for a movie, and that something was, we saw a goose cross the street, but using a crosswalk. Like the goose knew where the crosswalk was, and waited for the cars, and then waited for the light, and then crossed the street. This became quite quickly an idea about an orangutan going to college, and I'm not entirely sure how that came about, but there is some disconnect between the goose, and then an orangutan going to college. I think probably what it was, honestly, is that I didn't go to college, and I felt like if an orangutan could go to Harvard, well, then maybe I could go to Harvard someday. There we are, and the initial idea was made up, literally I just made this image in Inkscape, and that was to try and sell the idea to my friends, and I don't know if you can catch it at all, but the word orangue is written in a college font, which means college, and so the you in orangutan becomes a university. That's the idea, and this is Bob Call. Bob's sitting right there with kind of big hair and an engine next to you, and Bob used to be an intern at the FSF, and during his internship, we made this thing called Good Call Bad Call with Bob Call, and it's sort of a TV chat show in which Bob would decide if things were good calls or bad calls. We edited the entire thing in an afternoon on a Macintosh that we had kicking around, and we thought we could maybe make this into the, we could use Bob as an actor for the movie, and so we asked Bob to appear in the movies, and he agreed, and if you'd like to go and watch Good Call Bad Call, there's the aura. This is Ryan, and I met Ryan in 2013, and Ryan became really involved with the writing and the producing of the movie, and until this point, until the meeting with Ryan, we really had lots of disparate ideas about like, hey, hey, we're gonna make a monkey movie someday, and it'll be funny and great, but nothing was ever written down. Never nothing had to really become of it until we met Ryan, and then we really sort of kicked into gear, and we started writing a lot. This is a picture of us in a restaurant with laptops that proves we're writing a lot. We wrote everything in plain text, in Markdown, so Ryan is using TextMate on his Mac, which is GPL licensed, and we were checking things into Dropbox and Git, and we had this very crude system of numbering scenes where you would number them in a sequential order, and then this make file that would compile those things into a PDF file, and that was kind of our writing process. We'd write scenes, save them, a PDF would get generated, we'd read the PDF file, and then we would go through and check if errors. Making movies is expensive, so we needed some monkey movie money, and our friend Justin came along and gave us some cash, and with this money, we bought a GoPro and an orangutan costume, and later ran an IndieGoGo campaign, and you'll see the extent to how good the costume is in a minute. At this point in time, I worked at Creative Commons, and so I really had this idea of making the movie be this kind of example of what you could do with Creative Commons licensing and with free software, and so I had this notion of editing the entire movie in free software, and I went on this show called Computer File, which is a YouTube show, and I mentioned to the host, Sean, my idea of making things with free software, and then to prove me wrong, he edited the episode of Computer File in both proprietary software and in free software, and the free software one is kind of unwatchable. No, nevertheless, so we took the monkey suit that we had and my cell phone, and went down the street to the river and scared some people with the monkey suit, made some clips and used Blender to put those things together. I used Blender purely because Blender didn't crash with the files from my phone, but later I think I made the right choice. So we decided to go ahead. We decided that we wouldn't try and do it in iMovie. We would do the entire thing in Blender, using Inkscape and Gimp to make the titles and things. So now we have to make a movie. So with the money we raised, which is about $7,000, we had a casting session, we hired people, we paid them, we filmed them for four days, and all the filming took place in downtown Boston. We used locations like the Free Software Foundation office and real bars because you could just ask people to let you in and they don't generally mind too much about you filming stuff there. So here's Richard's in day one. You can see that that is the entirety of our crew, except one person taking the picture, and that is the actress playing the orangutan realizing how cheap the suit looks for the very first time. Day two takes us to this lovely Irish bar and then to the FSF office, which is the top-left, top-right picture. Someone's real desk at the FSF. It was just that untidy, and then this loft space that we used again for the casting. By day three, we've progressed to a man-naked, or topless, with runes and a python head. And day four, we're in an office again. And by day four, we are back at this one location and then we are right there in the middle of downtown Boston next to the river for our final scene. So that's all well and good. Four days of fun filming things with a camera, trying to avoid the police, who, funnily enough, when you stand around in downtown Boston with a little handheld camera and someone in a monkey costume that's quite cheap-looking, they don't really ask you for permits and stuff. They just assume you're students. So that was quite nice. But we had to move it really, really quickly. We had four days to film because on day five, I would have moved to Texas, so that would be hard to film. So, a bunch of footage. What to do next? One thing I noticed almost immediately is the audio on our clips was really, really bad. And I guess we can talk about more about that in a minute. So, enter Blender. And I spent a lot, I didn't know really, I didn't really know Blender very well when I started using it, but again, it was the thing that didn't crash. And here is the real Blender file for the movie itself in all of its glory. Scrolled out a little bit so you can't see the whole thing, but it's about 50 minutes long. And all of the kind of bits and pieces of editing that we did there. Big shout out to Inkscape. Inkscape is fantastic. We used it for almost anything you ever see text on the screen or logos on the screen. They're all done in Inkscape. My co-writer, Ryan, is an illustrator by trade and so he was actually able to draw things pretty quickly on a Wacom tablet and then we could actually have those in Inkscape and then just play around with them and stuff, so. That was really helpful. All of the text, again, Inkscape's text handling is really nice and the end credits are done in Inkscape. We have this very long PNG image, which is, I should, you can see it there. It's pretty long, pretty big. The way we did credits was just put everyone's name in a giant Inkscape file and then just move the camera over that image in Blender, which seemed to be the way to do it at least I could figure out. We edited everything on this laptop and as you just saw the video in this talk, this thing and project doesn't screen as they work terribly well and it also has a 4K screen and a touch screen and all of those things combined don't work very well. Blender works great. Inkscape and GIMP have very tiny icons that you can barely click on. But again, this is using Ubuntu LTFs and so it's possible things have progressed a little since then. Rendering, it takes a while. Actually, the credit sequence takes longer to render than the movie. Not sure why, but we use a single pulverize. Pulverize is a PHP script that basically runs, in our case, eight copies of Blender at once and renders like a chunk of the movie in each instance. And at the end, combines those files together and gives you one AVI file for this, the entire movie. And I had a pretty nice setup going with that where basically I would change things, hit save, and then it would notice I'd save things, it would r-sync all the files up to the server and start rendering stuff. So about an hour later, I would have a rendered movie to look at. And it worked. This is the real screen of the movie being edited and I put all these like time codes and things in in Blender so I could see exactly when and where things were at work so I could edit things out later on. In the final days of editing, I made lots of tiny edits. Every one of these post-it notes is a thing to remove or change in the movie. This is about two days before we had to show the movie to the public. Inkscape was really good here. We made a lot of like small graphics to like kind of patch up problems and things and all the sound effects were done by just dialing a cell phone and then making the noise with our mouths into the phone and then recording that out of the voicemail inbox and putting it in Blender which is I think how the professionals do it, so. At some point towards the end, the book showed up. This took a while to write and make the movie so while I was kind of having some downtime, I wrote a book where I took the movie and made it into a book. I have some books with me today that I can give away at the end. If you like a book, come see me. We also put something in the book that's a bit strange is that at one point we had... I'm a big fan of really bad movies and even worse TV shows and some of the best TV shows in the world are TV shows that are based on movies. So for example, you know that there is a Ferris Bueller's day-off TV show with Jennifer Aniston. There is a TV show of the movie The Net. We had this brilliant idea that we would make a TV show version of Orang-U at the same time as making the movie and then have a scene in the movie where the orangutan would turn the TV on and then watch the pilot episode himself. It's a brilliant idea that we couldn't realize because we ran out of money. So we are giving you all the entire screenplay to the sitcom pilot and by attending this talk, you are now legally obliged to produce that and film it and give it to me. Thanks for coming. We had a premiere at a local theatre, I guess appropriate for a movie made with free software that Richard Stallman came along and he sat through the entire thing and then asked me at the end about 1,000 questions about why did the orangutan do this? And I didn't answer any of them. The AV gear at the theatre did not work very well. In fact, it blew up about a minute into the movie starting. So there was a bit of a hurried dash to a computer store to buy a new projector and stuff. People gave us money, which was odd. And then we uploaded some of those assets, the movie itself, the full thing, the screenplay, the book, they're all in the archive. My goal is to upload all of the blender files and all of the source footage and stuff. I want to go through that a bit more because there's a lot of footage there that takes it and quite go well or there's bits of behind the scenes dialogue that are not necessarily appropriate for the wider world. So, well, let me cursing. We're now working on orangutu monkey business and I rang you three double trouble. They're coming, they're actually filming those this summer. Like, we have screenplays for those in the works. We have casting sessions that have already happened. We have people lined up coming in to do these things. And the big question we had when we started doing this was, should we use blender again to do this? And I'm not sure because it would be nice to use Free Software for everything and in an ideal world that would be fantastic. But I'm also the only person, I think, who can edit this in blender, like that we know, certainly. There are not many people out there who use blender for video editing. There's Basim out in Massachusetts. We met with him and he didn't want to do it. If we didn't use blender, we could potentially have a better looking movie at the end of it. And if we process those source files, those video files and audio files with proprietary software and then release them to you under a free license, is that maybe better in the long run for free culture than someone using blender to edit the movie? Because I don't think there are gonna be that many people who would, even if you were gonna remix the movie, would be giving you my blender files help that much if they're just edits of video clips with bits of Thanksgiving in there. I'm not sure. I would love to know what you think. You can email me or whatever, tweet me or whatever. There are things I think we need to improve on our end to within production and that is definitely the audio. The audio is quiet in places and it clips in other places and it's frustrating to listen to. And I think that people are way more okay with bad audio than bad video. Sorry, go the other way around. Better video than not bad, bad audio. We need a longer filming schedule. We can't, you can't make a movie in four days. Realistically, you can't make two movies in four days, certainly. You need to rehearse. Actors need time to rehearse. Some of the actors were coming on set and meeting for the very first time and then three minutes later be in a scene together. That didn't always work out too great. And we need a shorter time from filming to release. I think that you have a certain amount of buzz. You get people interested in the movie. You want to fund it. A metrics two and a half years to come out. That kind of sucks too. I think we can fix some of those things on our end and maybe the shorter time to release is done with using different tools and maybe hiring a person to edit the movie. I got a whole bunch of thanks here. People who are in the movie, et cetera. Thanks Bob. Bob never came to be in the movie in the end. He has a contract that he signed for eight movies. Didn't appear in any of them so far. So I'm publicly shaming you, Bob. It's okay though. It's fine. We actually got Samantha, who's a producer of ours. She actually wanted to be the orangutan, so great for her. But I would encourage you all to go and download the movie and the book for free arangymovie.com. These are our people. And yeah, I now want to throw this whole thing into open to questions about like for free culture. Is it better to use free software or what? Like what do you, if you were to receive a free culture movie made in Premiere or Final Cut, whatever the cool kids nowadays use, is that better or is that worse? So I don't know. Did you reach out to any of the guys in the Blender Institute for the films that they had previously produced and looked at any of the workflows that elephants dream or Big Buck Bunny and what they might have been doing that might help maybe use some of that pain? I use Blender as a video editor myself. So I feel the pain of doing it and I can't imagine having to try to piece together a 15-minute long film. 50. 50, I'm sorry, 50-minute long film in. But they had some workflows that seemed to work well for them that might not have been just CG specific. And I didn't know if... I didn't look into those too much because I did feel like they were probably two CG related. So what we're proposing is, so the end goal of the first one is, you're gonna go to the internet archive, you can download every piece of video that's in the movie, every scene in the movie, video and audio, and the end Blender file and all the other bits and pieces. What we're suggesting for the second one is, you get all of those things again, but no Blender file. And I wonder how useful the Blender file is. I guess if somebody wants to, has to subscribe to a month or two of Adobe's Creative Suite to edit the video, it's not necessarily free anymore, right? Well, we're not suggesting we would give you the... I would never give you a file made to use proprietary software. So the first one would give you the Blender file and the second one, we just wouldn't give you the... You just get the raw footage. You get the raw footage, yeah. I have a question related to that. In any proprietary editor, are there export options that would let you save your edit decisions and things or something a little more like... Yeah. Documenting than you did? I would hope so. I don't know. I also had an idea that maybe what we could also do as part of this is to try and at least spearhead something that would allow free tools to import those Premiere files or whatever files. They're likely XML at this point in time, I imagine. So I just wonder what that might look like. Yeah. I don't want you to use Premiere either, but, and I'm not gonna use it myself. I'm gonna sit next to someone who we're gonna pay to do that work and I just wonder what that looks like. Yeah. I got here a little late. Did you ever consider something like Kden Live? So Kden Live crashed when I put the video files into it. And I should also say about Blender. Blender also crashed when I put video files into it. I had to go to Steam and download the version of Blender on Steam to get a version, like a binary of Blender from Blender to have a version of Blender that didn't crash on me all the time. I have a question that maybe might take too long to answer, so tell me, for those of us who have not done video editing, certainly in any long form, can you describe generally where the awkwardness is felt when you're using Blender to edit video? Is it interface issues? Is it things not being set up for speed, something else? If I compare the process of editing a 25 minute long chat show with Bob in it to an hour long movie, when you want to do things like add a caption to a video, in iMovie you just click and it's done. And then the workflow in Blender, you go into Inkscape, you make that image, a 1920, 1080 picture. You say there's a ping file, bring it into Blender, you import it. That's not the worst thing. For me, I think it's more like, at least we couldn't find, and without audio issues especially, there were not good tools for editing those audio files. And there was the next step of like, well, why don't you use Audacity for that? Audacity hates me. I can show you on this machine, like you start Audacity, it might work for a bit, then the entire machine cast baby and it screws it three times. It screws something up. So yeah, I don't know. Sorry, I came in a little late also. The files, can you tell me what type of files those were that you were trying to import to that tool? Yeah, they're like, they're called like AC3 or something like that. I can definitely dig them out for you. And I can happily provide you with the original files if that would improve importing them somehow. In the end, I ended up using FMPEG to convert all of them, to just like H.264 video, which that made things a little bit easier too. But yeah, certainly those files, straight off the Canon XA10 camera, so whatever that uses as its native format. Matt. Dennis. There is a video editing mode in Emacs, have you tried that? Yeah, I tried to use that and all my movies came out in black and white with green text. Actually, seriously, there is actually, but do you feel that maybe doing in 4K was a stumbling block for using things like Kden Live or PITID? We did 4K, we did HD. Oh, okay. The machine itself is 4K, but we did HD video. Actually, I think not doing 4K was a mistake because when we wanted to do things like crop certain bits of the picture, what you're seeing then is like a bad picture, basically. Brian is here from the Phoenix Linux user group and he records our presentations in 4K using Kden Live so that you can zoom in and put a picture in picture and stuff, so if you run into him, ask him. Cool, yeah. So I manage a community of photographers using free software workflows and one of the things we've been talking about recently has been branching out to videographers and cinematographers as well because we do, there's a little bit of an overlap in some of those things and I'm offering some help if you're interested for them. We can talk offline about it, but it's... Yeah. We have some folks that are very talented. Cool, that would be great, yeah. Maybe this isn't a question for an attorney, but how did you deal with image releases and that kind of thing for video that you were releasing into the public domain? Yeah, everyone signed a contract that basically says their footage is released under that license in perpetuity and they claim no model rights over it. Yeah. Speaking as someone whose experience with video editing is basically limited to making short little three-minute clips and also using Blender because it was the only really usable which is hard to say for open source, unfortunately. It was the best tool I could find for what I needed to get done. I would personally value having the Blender files available because it would provide me a way to study and understand how some of the things that need to be done in a longer form movie, like you said, you had to do subtitling or captions or things like that and not necessarily... Tutorials are good, but a practical example that you have the Blender file for, that you can study is a useful thing and so I think that's an argument in favor of the more difficult route. Yeah, and to that end, we intend to make this thing called monkeymovie.org, which is a short website that will basically do a video about 15 minutes long with me explaining how to make a video and then we'll also give you the Blender files for that video. So you don't have to worry about the whole feature-length movie, but it's a good length of movie with different takes and different shots and things of that and we'll show you how to do all of that. That will happen at some point. Hopefully, my plan was to have to be doing that while the other person was editing the movie and like something else for me. So who knows? I mean, I want to do that for real, yeah. And bring it out on VHS as well. I feel like we lost a little bit of art when we went from having those VHS spaces or real tapes to the current way of doing it, which I guess is YouTube. Okay, so on the point of Laserdisc, so I actually had a phone call with someone in Japan trying to purchase one of the last remaining Laserdisc writers in the world. There's no more media. Yeah, blank Laserdiscs that you can write onto once are like $400 each now. So yeah. So you have to make your own. Make your own. We do have the soundtrack from the movie coming out on cassette too. If you'd like to get one of those, the website completely seriously, like we have 250 orange cassettes coming from a warehouse somewhere. Movie, all, you know, all share our license music, so. I've yet another question. Yep. And you may have said this and I missed it, but the short that you were in for a computer file? Yeah. And you said he edited the segment twice once in. I think Caden Live. Caden Live, okay. That's what I was gonna ask was if he had used Blender, I'm serious. Yeah, I did a follow-up video somewhat recently where he did editing in some other tool. I forget what that was. It may have been Caden Live or Pitch TV or something like that. I have not really kept abreast of these situations once I found Blender. So maybe there is something else that has Caden Impidity with the two big ones, I think at the time. There was talk of VLC producing an editor at some point, but I think that never came to fruition. That's fair enough. They have a lot of work to do anyway, so. Another question, when you mentioned the possibility of hiring an editor to do your project, have you gotten a feel for how much time someone, how do you spec that out? You say we have, we want a 50-minute video, we have this much footage, and they give you a... I really don't know. The nice thing, if you can call it that, about using Steam's version of Blender is that I have stats on my Steam page of how long I've had Blender open for. And that includes me going to get coffee and eating and watching the video back in Blender, so that's not, but also being not very good at it. So I think that I spent about 400 hours to produce nearly an hour of footage. I don't know if that's, I think a professional could probably have done that in like 100 hours, if not less. I guess I'd like to know, you know, yeah. But we would pay people to do it, we would not. Everyone gets paid for this except me. So, any other questions? All right. Well, I'll be outside the room with books. I don't have very many, but it's freely licensed, so you can go ahead and print your own. Or you can buy one from lulu.com for six bucks. I'll be giving them away outside the room here. Should you have any other questions? But please do check it out, rangymovie.com. And yeah, thanks.