posted: 2009-06-24 With added music, opening sequence and credits Valkaama now is a complete movie and hence the first Open Source feature film. In order for you to see the result of the last three months efforts you can watch and download the current version of the movie here.

Although the movie is complete it is still tagged as Beta. The reason for this is that like in (Open Source) software development improvements are still possible. For Valkaama this means that the current music score will be improved and that even two new scores are being created. If you want to check out the ongoing work on the music please visit our YouTube page.

posted: 2009-06-03 An important part of what the whole Open Source Movie thing is all about is to enable others to use the material we produce for their own purposes. And one really great example for such a usage of Valkaama is West Latta's tutorial on how to make a film score on audio tuts+. So let's shortly analyse why an Open Source Movie like Valkaama which uses an OS compatible license such as the Creative Commons by-sa is needed for people like West to safely use external clips in order to do such great stuff as film score tutorials.

Liberal licenses like the Creative Commons licenses you can apply in order to give others the freedom to use your own creative work within a safe legal framework. The license hereby clearly states the DO's and DON'Ts when it comes to handling the material. So why is an Open Source compatible Creative Commons license the best choice?

As you probably know there are 6 standard CC licenses which consist of one ore more of the following modules or conditions: by (Attribution), nc (Noncommercial), nd (NoDerivs) and sa (ShareAlike). If you now make some research you will quickly find out that most of the few free movies you can find on the web are using the condition nd, and almost all of them the condition nc. So why is that counterproductive for people like West? And furthermore, why he couldn't make his tutorial without access to the movie's sources?

First of all free movies licensed under nd conditions don't allow you to make any modifications to the material. Hence they are useless for any reuse, remix or mashup and... no tutorials with these. Second of all, the nc module is quite a trap. On the webpage West's tutorial is published it is possible to gain access to premium content (source files, bonus tutorials and more) by paying a monthly fee. Although this particular tutorial which uses scenes from Valkaama is freely accessible the fact that it is also offered within a commercial framework clearly infringes the nc term. The same applies to the small commercials displayed on the webpage.

Well, so much for the licenses... As for the sources, why exactly are they needed? The reason for this is quite simple, yet important: the source tracks containing the dialogues can be downloaded separately from our FTP Server. Since they aren't mixed with music yet, you can simply add another film score without having to separate voice and music before. A task which is nearly impossible by the way.

Resources:

- The Process of Score Composition Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
- Tutorial videos on vimeo: First draft, Final score




Note: This version of scene 56 still has some color grading issues we're trying to fix in the forthcoming BETA of Valkaama.

posted: 2009-05-01 The English subtitles of Valkaama can be downloaded now. Hopefully other language versions will follow by the help of people who like our movie and our free culture project. If you want to make subtitles in a different language you can use simple programs like Subtitle Workshop or others. All you need is the current Alpha 2 version of the movie and the English subtitle file which already contains the timings of the dialogues.

Apart from the subtitles the script of the movie is now also available as a PDF file in English and German. Get it at the Sources page.

Update (23.05.2009): German subtitles are available.

Update (16.06.2009): Polish subtitles are available.

posted: 2009-04-07 Am 2. April habe ich auf der Re:publica '09 einen Vortrag über Open Source Filme gehalten. Eine schöne Zusammenfassung davon gibt es auf der Webseite des t3n Magazines. Die Vortragsfolien könnt ihr hier ansehen und vielleicht kann ich noch ein Video dazu auftreiben, da einer der Konferenzteilnehmer seine Videokamera dabei hatte und die Präsentation aufgezeichnet hat.

posted: 2009-03-25 The Alpha 2 version of Valkaama is now available. The most important improvement affects the sound which has been completely reworked by Michael Georgi. For a more detailed overview of what has changed, have a look into our changelog.

posted: 2009-03-23 from: YouTube (service@youtube.com)   -   to: Valkaama

Dear Valkaama,

Thank you for your interest in the YouTube Partner Program. Our goal is to extend invitations to as many partners as we can. Unfortunately we are unable to accept your application at this time. The current level of viewership of your account has not met our threshold for acceptance.

Applications are reviewed for a variety of criteria, including but not limited to the size of your audience, country of residence, quality of content, and consistency with our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use. Please review the program qualifications (http://www.youtube.com/partners) for a complete list of our criteria.

As we continue to expand we hope to be able to accept a broader group of partners. We have registered your interest in the program and will continue to monitor your account for potential future acceptance into the program.

Thank you for your understanding.

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from: Valkaama   -   to: YouTube (service@youtube.com)

Dear YouTube, Inc.

Thank you for the automatic review of our Partner Program application and account data. We understand that quality cannot be evaluated by algorithms or simply doesn't matter. Next time we will produce tons of videos of animals playing the piano. This kind of content seems to be more suitable for a broader audience. We have learned our lesson.

Thank you for enlightening us,

The Valkaama Team.

posted: 2009-03-21 When applying color grading to video it is usually recommended to stay within the safe colors. Safe colors range from values 16-235 for each RGB value. This is the broadcasting world.

In the computer world however we got the full range of RGB colors with values from 0 to 255 and that's a tricky thing to combine. If you want to play a game on your broadcasting-world TV set and the game shows a dark object on your computer screen (RGB values lower than 16 for one or more of the color channels) your TV might not understand that and display everything below the safe values as his lowest value so you will loose all the details. The other way round, when playing back safe color coded video on your computer screen, you will not get a nice black but rather a milky look since the dynamic range of the computer screen isn't fully used.

To compensate this, today's graphics card drivers usually can either be set to display the full dynamic range for video (0-255) or use the limited 'safe' range (16-235). And here is the trap. With the wrong setting you might have a nicely looking video displayed on your computer screen while the image on other computers with different settings will be much worse. This is exactly what happened at the first public screening of Valkaama. What was intended and displayed on my laptop you can see on the left-hand side of the picture below. What the beamer was showing you can see on the right side.

After a good day of searching for explanations of this bug I changed my driver settings to display the full dynamic color range for videos. This resulted in my laptop displaying videos much darker. Now I only had to do the color grading for most of the scenes again and raising black levels as well as tweaking the gamma and brightness values brought the details back. Thank you graphics card driver for another 2 days of work.



A smart explanation of the issue can be found here ;)

posted: 2009-03-07 The first public screening of Valkaama will take place at the Linux days in Chemnitz on March 14. The Alpha 2 version of the movie will be shown including some scenes with music.

Update (2009-03-16):

The event was a bit smaller than anticipated and only about 70 to 80 people attended the night of free movies. The reactions towards the movie were quite different and anything from 'I like it' to 'boring' could be heard. Especially the end of the movie was criticised for being too sudden. So there's still some work to be done... although certainly no miracles will happen.

Another objection of the audience was that the story is a bit too confusing in the beginning of the movie. The question arose whether Lasse knows that Ari is dead or if he doesn't. This problem might have occured because on the one hand the acoustics in the screening room wasn't the best and on the other hand there was a lot of chatter in the back of the room. People who were not interested in the film rather hacked with their laptops disturbing the people who were actually trying to follow the story.

Anyway. The best moment we had in the middle of the movie when the previously ordered pizza arrived resulting in a 5-10 minutes chaos while everyone was trying to get his or her share. Watching the movie was impossible during this time. But... no reason to get upset. In the end it was a side venue of a Linux conference so most of the people attending weren't really the target audience for the film.

Special thanks to Sirko Kemter at this point who organized the night of free movies and also attended the talk following the screening of Valkaama. He pointed out some very interesting aspects concerning Open (Source) movies so we were able to create an interesting discussion about the topic which surely was very interesting for the audience.