Behind the camera

If you want to create your own "movies" in the widest sense and make your productions available under a free licence, you have more options and can find numerous help files on the internet. The tutorials range from a site which explains how to run your own internet TV station to sites which serve for publishing your own videos - there are now plenty of those around. These three websites are dedicated to CC licensed material more explicitly than, for example, Google Video or YouTube (although you can also find a lot of videos with CC licence there): Ourmedia, Revver and blip.tv are all waiting to be filled with users' videos - so there is plenty of space and bandwidth available for publishing material under the Creative Commons licence.

Stray Cinema: Free film clips for remixing

Another three stops for movie fans offer first experiments with film remixes and "mash-ups" of freely available film clips: although StrayCinema, FreeCinema and Open Source Cinema are still in their early days they try to recreate for film what has already become far more widely accepted in music. The idea is to produce new original film material, offer it for remixing under a free licence and then republish the remixes - apparently a good idea, in principle.

However, large scale sharing has so far probably been prevented by several factors: it is an unusual idea for film makers, and there are technical hurdles - video editing can't be mastered in a weekend, and the necessary software is either very expensive or very basic and work-intensive: films either require people and places or render farms, and ideally a combination of all three. At the moment, searching YouTube, Google Video and blip.tv for videos under CC and accessing public domain films at archive.org is more worthwhile.

Nevertheless, the world of film is also changing. The Sundance film festival, for example, has started to show films online - although these don't come with a free licence to remix, but at least they are free to view. Amateur film makers can use the YouTube Sundance channel to contribute one-minute videos.

All of this has so far, however, been handled in compliance with the usual copyright regulations. As many independent films immediately disappear back from where they came after a festival, the concept promises to establish a setup which promotes the sharing and public awareness of these films.

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