 Hello. Welcome to Making a Movie with Wikimedia Commons. The story of the last line. This is a lightning talk. It will be fast, it will be short, it will be punchy. And it is the story of how I made a short documentary using incredible resources from Wikimedia Commons. I'm really excited to be with you all. I hope that if you've made a film before, you are thinking about making another one, and you're going to make it with Wikimedia Commons resources. And if you've never made a film before, you're feeling like you could. Let's go forward. My name is Zach McCune. I have been a Wikimedian since 2005. And today, I work at the Wikimedia Foundation as the director of brand. I'm also an artist and a filmmaker, a graphic designer. I really try to work as much as possible with free to use public domain and archival material. And I also try to release the things that I make as public domain or Creative Commons assets. I endeavor to emphasize the word creative in Creative Commons. And this image is from a conference that happened in Shantagar, India. It was an amazing opportunity for me to travel there when I got to teach a short introduction to photography. So that's why there's so many cameras in this image. Since 2019, I have been making short films from archival material. This is material that may be in the public domain or released by government agencies. It might be work that has had a copyright expire. And fundamentally, this is fun work to make movies from because it's kind of forgotten. People have failed to remember the stories that are embedded in all of this old footage. In each of these three films, I've crafted a story. I've cut the material together. And my amazing fiance has created the music for them. She's put the compositions together so that they have incredible soundtracks. We've been really lucky to get these films into 11 film festivals in seven countries and counting. Unfortunately, we have never been able to attend any of the film festivals because of COVID-19. So like this conference, a lot of these film festivals that usually would be in person happened instead online. Now, let's talk about Wikimedia Commons. At 87 million free-to-use files, Wikimedia Commons is the world's largest free-to-use collection of audio and visual materials. It's just an incredible resource. And every day, people put more and more stuff into it. Incredible images, great archival material, incredible videos, audio files. It's just amazing to see the things happen. Wikimedia Commons is most often used for Wikimedia projects. Things like Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, and Wikidata. It's used most often within our own system. But I want to tell you Wikimedia Commons is also an extraordinary resource for filmmakers. And I'm going to tell you a bit more about how I made a short film recently, almost entirely from Wikimedia Commons material. The story begins right here. I found myself on this Wikipedia page in December of 2021. It tells a sad story about a lion subspecies that has gone extinct in the wild. Hidden on this page is this incredible info box. An image with this caption. It's about the last photograph known of this subspecies. And it included a link for the photographer, Marcelin Philandrin. Like any other Wikipedia reader. Here's what I found. I went ahead and clicked that link. And I found a short Wikipedia article on English about Marcelin. But better. I found on Commons a world of his creative work. Things that had entered the public domain and been digitized by Wikimedians to be accessible for anyone anywhere in the world. Marcelin's imagery documents Morocco in the 1920s and 1930s. He took photographs from planes, mostly, but also loved to take photographs on the street and on landscapes. As I'll tell you, and you'll see in the film, he also had a penchant for taking photographs of more adult subjects. New images, erotic images. Things that we might even consider pornography today. When I couldn't find images from Marcelin Philandrin, I actually went searching through online archives, libraries, bookshops, and more to purchase original works by Marcelin Philandrin. And when they would arrive, as this one did in February, I would go ahead and add it to Wikimedia Commons by digitizing it myself. In fact, I'll show you, I have a book of his work right here. And in this book near the back is something really beautiful that I found, which is a photograph of the photographer himself. It's just gentle, so I'm going slow. Here we are. Here's Marcelin. So I bring it into view for you all. This is the image now on Wikipedia of Marcelin Philandrin. We didn't have a photograph of him. I found it in this public domain book. I digitized it and added it to Commons. Overall, I collected 20 images of which 17 were from Wikimedia Commons. That's 85%. And I put them into storyboards, like you might for a slide presentation, and I wrote a script to guide the whole story. I hired a narrator to read the script, and my partner, my fiance, she crafted a musical score to accompany the work. It all came together when we premiered the film in April of this year in San Francisco at the Green Environmental Film Festival. We were delighted, honored to premiere it there. And we have two more places to premiere the film so far. One in New York City and one in Los Angeles. We're really hoping to show up more places in the world. And after we finish screening it at festivals for people who love environmental topics, documentary topics, we'll do what I have done with the other three films, which is release it online for anyone to see and use and borrow from. With that, I'd like to call to the audiovisual experts. I'd like to show you this film. I'd like to do a premiere here at Wikimedia for the international premiere, the worldwide premiere for anyone who wants to see this film, not in one market, but anywhere. I'll go quiet for three and a half minutes as we watch this film. It is a haunting image. At the end of a long rocky canyon, a single lion stands facing the sun. It's a male. We know from his mane. And because the lion was photographed high in the Atlas Mountains, we know that this is a barbaric lion native to this region. This image is from 1925. And it is the last come from siding of a barbaric lion in the wild. The photo was made by a man named Marcelin Flandre. He was born in French Algeria. During the First World War, he learned how to take photographs from planes. In Casablanca, he applied his skills to city scenes and landscapes. He was Morocco's first aerial photographer and innovative image maker. He sold books and postcards. He offered portraits and commissions. He also made porn, exploitative stuff, with an orientalist view of North African women. But mostly, Marcelin is known for the lion. The barbaric lion lived across North Africa for millennia. It was hunted by pharaohs 3,000 years ago. It was the lion feared by ancient Rome, used to fight gladiators and in public executions. When people say, throw them to the lions, they are referring to these lions. Framed as the ultimate killers, centuries of hunting eradicate the subspecies. Marcelin was 46 when he joined an Elmer flight from Casablanca to Dakar. We can only imagine the trip. How long were they in the air? What was the route? When did he notice the lion? Did he take multiple photos? Was the lion really alone? We do not know. We do not know when Marcelin realized he had captured history. We cannot rescue or recover the barbaric lion. And yet, thanks to Marcelin Flamre, we can still see it. A lot of the questions were about the source of the material. So it was a chance for me to talk to film lovers and filmmakers about Wikimedia Commons and how much is available there. So I want to say here, just as I said at that moment, that this film would not be possible without Wikimedia Commons and the people who digitized work and added work to that incredible global repository. You know, well, sometimes we don't know where the work that we're making is going. I wanted to celebrate those folks who have taken time to contribute this archival material from around the world. Because, you know, with Marcelin Philandrin, the subject with his passing, the work became distributed around the world. Just as I have some of it here and it become a Marcelin Philandrin collector. And thank you all for the kind notes in the chat here. I will pass on the credit. The music, I think, is much stronger than the film. It's a whole different topic. If we can go to the next slide. I don't know where we are. Yeah, there it is. Commons made this possible. Let's go forward one more, please, on the slides. Let's see if I can get us there. Perfect. I want to let you all know that I put all the images that are on Commons and in use in this film here at a page off of my own Commons account. So if you want, there's the short link there. You can find some of these works. They're from Wikimedia Commons there in case you want to make use of them. And in particular, of course, that postcard, the postcard of the last Barbary lion. That's an extraordinary, extraordinary, I mean, very evocative image. It truly is haunting. And that's the entire story really centers on that. Overall, I want to come back to the power of Commons. It's a platform that people are always adding their points of view to something that makes us understand and see the world better every day. And I know that it has been so vital. It is the core of so much of the visual knowledge work that we do here in the Wikimedia movement. But I want to celebrate the fact that it can be a creative resource as well. And in the future, we may be in a position to offer it to creators and filmmakers and see what they do with it. I get kind of excited thinking about a possible build on the wiki loves work as something like filmmakers love wiki where they actually show us what they make. With these resources. Thanks so much. My name is Zach McCune. It's been great to be with you. You can find me on my talk page or you can draw me an email. Really appreciate your time. Have a great wikimedia.