hi,

I am producing a documentary movie called the Digital Tipping Point about how Free Open Source Software (FOSS) is changing global culture.  I have been mostly lurking on this list for a while, because we are using all FOSS tools for our project.

I am wondering if there is anyone on this list who is making active use of FOSS audio tools in the San Francisco Bay Area.  If so, I would like to interview that person on film for the DTP project.

We are building the DTP out of fully forkable footage here on the Internet Archive. Link below.  (Forkable here means that you can both copy the footage and create a derivative work).

Our idea is that we want to produce a movie-in-a-box for people with really low end systems who would like to get decent interview footage to include in their own little movies about why FOSS is cool, and how it is going to change their lives.

We have filmed many dignitaries such as Christian Ude (the Mayor of Munich), Hermann-Josef Pelgrim (the Mayor of Schwaebisch Hall), Gilberto Gil (the Culture Minister of Brazil), and Luiz Millan Vazquez de Miguel, (the Extremaduran Minister of Science, Education).  The theme of our film is that Free Open Source Software (FOSS) will help foster an explosion of literacy and creativity globally. Our film is the first feature length documentary to be built on-line out of fully forkable footage released under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license on the Internet Archive. 

We have 55 hours so far loaded onto the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection.  You can see our raw video here:

http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=digitaltippingpoint

That footage is raw footage, and will need to be re-rendered before it is used in any final project.  It is also much more poorly lighted than you are used to, and the audio is also only on one channel, to reduce overhead.  Also, frankly we are simple end users who are hoping to prove that yes, GNU Linux is simple enough that even a knucklehead like me can make a full-length movie using it!  Plus, one of our video editors is 80 years old.  Talk about your grandpa using FOSS !  We have been to 5 nations and 3 continents on a shoe string budget, and so we didn't have the resources to drag lighting equipment along.  We shot everything with a Sony PD-170, which is a decent pro-sumer piece of equipment. 

Our keyword search index page is located below.  It is the place to go to find specific persons or themes for our footage.   The Internet Archive is currently changing its search software, and so the index might not be operational again until Monday, December 10, 2007.  Here is the index page nonetheless:

http:// tinyurl.com/yluwoc


The theme of our film is that the US is falling behind in certain technological areas due to its dependence on Microsoft and other proprietary code in areas where FOSS is ready for production on the desktop and elsewhere.  We are going to contrast our experiences in seeing the status of FOSS desktop development we found outside the US with our experiences here in the US in trying to migrate just one public middle school to FOSS.

Thank you either way for considering our request.

--
Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point