Grants/Studio Dorbel
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
Studio Dorbel is an online collaborative studio aiming at making open short movies.
The project is opened to everyone and entirely online. Participants from all over the world collaborate around computer generated movie projects in a framework that force a good organization, everyone bringing his talent.
Only free software and open standards are used, any resource, including the final result, is licensed under CC-BY.
It can be considered as the Wikipedia of computer generated short movies.
See [1] for a first portal prototype. [edit: the website have been pirated]
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
- a website and infrastructure dedicated to online movie making collaboration
- a community gathered around one or more movie projects
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
Targets for contributors are:
- People playing at home with art software. They could find a common goal by joining the project. (They are numerous and typically young, just see the popularity of Deviant Art or forums around 3D software)
- Free-lance artists who want to prove their skills and seek for popularity.
- People who love big shared projects (people who contribute to Wikipedia for example)
- People who want to tell and write stories.
When a movie is in production, readers can follow its progress. These followers could be :
- free culture enthoutiasts
- people who like short movies
- Blender fans
- bloggers from all over the world
- people part of the "contributor" target audiance, but who don't have time to contribute.
When a movie is ready, depending on its genre, it will target more or less people.
As contributors, anyone could bring his small skill, they could be (not exclusively):
- Story tellers
- 3D artists (models, shading, animation, environment, lightning)
- 2D artists (textures, concept art)
- Musicians, sound designers, voice actors
- Organizers
- Critics
...
We can suppose that most of them won't be professional, on the contrary they will mostly contribute on their free time using skills they don't use professionally.
We can also insist on the fact that they will learn things from the project (How a movie is done, how to work with others).br />
I consider myself as part of the target audience. I am a skilled 3D and 2D artist. I already made a short movie in collaboration with a musician in 2008 (see CAPODA).
I am in a good position to lead this project because I have both the technical skills to deploy the tools and the artistic skills to understand the needs.
I have experience with all the technologies described later on this page. I followed closely the making of the three open movie projects from the Blender Foundation, I am not a professional but have a large culture in movie-making.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
The global impact of the project could be measured by:
- the interest from blogs
- the online popularity of the project outputs (blog posts, video trailers) that will be released along the movie production
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
The number of participant will increase with the time. This is not a problem because it fits the needs of movie-making.
I expect to gather a first group of 10 active members.
Then as the work gets done and the word spread, other participant will join. Because the movie production can be cut into micro tasks, the number of participants on a single movie project could be up to 100 without any issue.
We can suppose that someone who decide to get involved in the project will continue for a long period because of his motivation to see the movie released.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
The project will directly contribute to and take advantage of "the commons":
- the movie will be release under a CC license.
- the "sources" of the movie will be available to download. (For people to learn, remix or improve)
- the movie will itself use CC-licensed works.
- the movie will be done with a completely innovative process (no real studio) by an online community.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
Collaborative platform
- MediaWiki is used as a wiki engine to provide the basics of the collaborative website
- Semantic MediaWiki is used because it allows to work on a flexible data structure. It add forms and semantic power to MediaWiki, this is perfect for manipulating movie data.
- SVN or an other version control system will be used to version the movie files
Creative Tools
- The main artistic tool will be Blender (Blender files are object oriented, which is fully adapted to this kind of project, for example, a scene file can link to two character files, data is not copied, but linked)
- 2D files will be created using GIMP, Inkscape, MyPaint for example
- Music will be mixed using Ardour
- online libraries of assets (music, soud effects, textures, 3D objects...)
My skills I am very familiar with MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki deployment. (I worked on CCTeamspace or acawiki.) I am professional web developer and could build some custom tools or addons for the project. I work with and administrate version control repositories every day.
For now, the project is hosted on my personal server. It would need a separated one.
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
- Gather a community: Not only the website has to be build and first content has to be created but a community has also to be gathered. I will have to spend time talking to my network or forums to spread to word.
- art is not like software, and artists are not like developers. It can be challenging to make hundreds of artists to work together and to still have a final product that looks great. Artists (especially volunteers) sometimes don't like their work to be criticized. A nice and agreeable working environment and feeling are must haves. People will have to be polite and adult, a good effort on community management has to be done for this to work.
- Movie data size could grow quickly. This could lead to technical issues (in the case of a self-hosted repository) or financial issues (in the case of a hosted repository) and could become a stopper for someone with no good Internet connection.
Websites such as Google Code project hosting, github or others do not have project size limitation in their free offer (if a limit is reached, a request have to be made to increase the size and I am confident that the project will convince them to do so).
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
Once everything is set up. The only real cost is hosting the website and the movie data.
Once a community is gathered, some volunteers could start to seek some donators or partners. Donators could be individuals, but also organizations who share the views of the project.
The Blender Foundation could also provide some funds.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
This project is scalable because a computer generated movie can be cut into thousands of micro-tasks if it is well organized by a larger framework (Studio Dorbel).
It can potentialy gather a very large number of contributors. This could lead to not-so-short movies of very high quality with a lot of details.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
Creative Commons could help to spread the word to its network.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
Today, there is no community or communication around the project. First prototypes of the portal and a movie project have been created to help demonstrate the idea.
Legal
Yes
