On the Willbe version youtube page, I found a pretty good suggestion in the comments: a Copy Bunny Progress bar. That was easy enough to make; here’s a truncated version in GIF format:

I also uploaded all the original .fla files to archive.org, so you can remix and modify to your heart’s content.

Also, did you know there’s a Copying Is Not Theft cloisonne pin? Well there is! And you can buy it.

NYT article about corporate zombies here.

Oh, and also here! (thanks Tom Quinn!)

Larger poster image here (please copy).

See the original anti-piracy ad here.

Here’s that Very Good Idea I promised yesterday. Please bear with this long post, it’s worth it I promise.

I.

Everyone’s heard of Dark Side of the Rainbow: You play your own legally-obtained audio of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, while watching a legally-obtained video of the Wizard of Oz. As long as the audio is legal, and the video is legal, enjoying them at the same time is legal.

But it’s a bit of a pain to do. You have to turn on your music player, and turn on your video player, and pause one while you start the other. It would be so nice if there were some shareware available that played video from one source with audio from another source. Something that would resolve the inconveniences Dark Side of the Rainbow fans currently endure:

Real or imagined, the effect is usually created by pausing a CD of the album at the very beginning, starting the DVD or tape of the film with the TV volume muted, and un-pausing the CD when the black-and-white MGM lion roars for the third time. (Note some versions have a color lion also. The black and white lion is the right one to use for the sync.) A minority of devotees argue that un-pausing the CD on the first roar produces a superior alignment. The effect can be repeated during the film by restarting the CD when the ‘Cowardly Lion’, during his initial scene, roars for the third time.

…Another factor that could affect the quality of the perceived synch is the version of the film used. The NTSC version, used in the United States, runs 101 minutes while the PAL version, used in Europe, runs 98 minutes (due to the system’s transfer rate of 30(NTSC) rather than 25(PAL) frames per second). Most users who have made websites touting the effect appear to be based in the USA. When using a PAL version of the DVD, digitally speeding up the album by 4.16% prior to starting fixes any problems with syncing. (link)

What a lot of hassles, huh? Free software could sure improve consumers’ viewing and listening experience. Such software would also facilitate audio description for the blind, and commentary tracks. Wouldn’t it be nice if people could easily share their own commentary tracks? In fact there’s already at least one company that just makes commentary tracks for existing movies, that offers its own proprietary player. So it’s not impossible to design a player. But of course it should be free, open-source, and easily work with common audio formats people already have like .aif, .wav, and .mp3.

YES, SOMEONE SHOULD REALLY MAKE A FREE OPEN-SOURCE PLAYER THAT LETS YOU LISTEN TO AUDIO AND PLAY VIDEO FROM SEPARATE SOURCES AT THE SAME TIME.

II.

If you haven’t been following my adventures trying to release Sita Sings the Blues, catch up here.

Per Wikipedia:

(Music rights) take four forms:

(1) royalties from ‘print rights’
(2) mechanical royalties from the recording of composed music on, CDs and tape
(3) performance royalties from the performance of the compositions/songs on stage or television through artists and bands, and
(4) synch (for synchronization) royalties from using or adapting the musical score in the movies, television advertisements, etc. (link)

Good news for Sita: the Annette Hanshaw recordings I used – the performances, or “master rights” – aren’t protected by federal copyright (the original copyrights were never renewed), and ‘print rights’ don’t apply to releasing the film since it doesn’t involve publishing sheet music or lyrics.

It’s synch rights that are the problem here.

III.

Now suppose someone wanted to distribute the soundtrack to a film such as Sita Sings the Blues. At most they’d have to clear mechanical rights. Luckily, those are much more affordable than synch rights, since they’re federally regulated: $.091 cents per song (per unit, I assume, which would mean per CD or Audio DVD). For Sita’s soundtrack, licensing would cost, at most, about $1.00 per disc. Cheap, legal, and fun!

And let’s say someone – me, maybe – distributed a DVD or video file or streaming video of Sita Sings the Blues, with all the contentious songs omitted. (I own all the visual artwork, and I have permission from the composers to use all the new music.)

And let’s say the consumer obtains the soundtrack fair and square, and also obtains the movie fair and square. And then they decide to listen to the soundtrack and watch the video at the same time. Like Dark Side of the Rainbow.

It would be so much easier if the consumer could use a FREE OPEN-SOURCE PLAYER THAT LETS YOU LISTEN TO AUDIO AND PLAY VIDEO FROM SEPARATE SOURCES AT THE SAME TIME.

And then they could play all kinds of audio with all kinds of video! How totally excellent for consumers. Excellent for everyone! Except maybe certain bloated parasitic corporations who couldn’t collect “synch rights” any more.

Someone should really write that software.

So I haven’t raised enough money to make a 35mm film print (yet). But I did raise enough to make a Digital Cinema Package, because the Stuttgart International Animation Festival offered a deal. And I borrowed enough to buy a new computer to re-render the entire 82-minute feature at a suitable higher resolution.

See, when I started Sita Sings the Blues, I couldn’t afford the processor power or disk space to work at the ideal resolution: 1920 x 1080 pixels. Instead I compromised at 1280 x 720 pixels, which in spite of being half the ideal resolution looks almost as good. The 35mm film test I did of Battle of Lanka looks great, anyway. But film has a natural grain, plus film floats around the screen a little, a result of analog frame registration (aka sprockets), both of which mask and “warm up” digital flaws. D-Cinema, however, has rock-solid registration and no grain, making it potentially less forgiving than film. Meanwhile computers and hard drives have gotten predictably cheaper since I began the project, and December is a “lost month” in New York anyway, it’s not like I’d have any freelance gigs or make any headway on promotions, and everyone gets lazy at work or leaves town, so… here I am, watching little blue progress bars for hours and days on end. Boring? You bet! But it will make the movie look infinitesimally better, so it’s all worth it. Also, D-Cinema supports 6-channel audio, so my sound designer is planning a super-duper surround-sound experience, which will make the picture look a lot better.