Someone has to pick up the slack on reporting on all of CC Australia’s great work. I guess that will be me. Check out what Jessica Coates said on the cc-community mailing list.

Just wanted to drop you a quick line to point out a great collaborative film project CCau took part in over the weekend – the Open Channel Video Slam (http://www.openchannel.org.au/artslaw/index.html). Apologies for cross posts.

Basically the idea was to produce one 10 minute film, made entirely out of CC and original content, by locking 22 filmmakers in a bar for 33 hours a whole lot of equipment, wireless internet access, and coffee, alcohol and pizza. The event was organised by Andrew Garton of the Open Channel Screen Resource Centre (http://www.openchannel.org.au) a government funded film production and training centre, and was hosted by Horse Bazaar (http://www.horsebazaar.com.au/) a great digital-arts bar in the heart of Melbourne that hosts the Digital Fringe Festival each year. Elliott Bledsoe and I from CCau were both there to help with training and addressing tricky issues (eg licence compatibility, searching etc).

What we ended up with was a 10 minute film that incorporates 110 CC-licensed works – photos, video, sound, music. This final product was screened in Horse Bazaar and on the big screen in Melbourne’s cultural hub, Federation Square, at 7pm Monday 14 May. It’s also available for download under a BY-NC-SA licence at http://openchannel.org.au/blogs/videoslam/.

It was a truly amazing experience, and a great learning curve for both us and the participants. Elliott and Andrew both documented the experience on their blogs (http://openchannel.org.au/blogs/videoslam/ and http://elliottsawitfirst.blogspot.com/). We’re also hoping to write up some of the lessons learned in an article, and maybe even an academic paper.

Jessica Coates
CCau

The question I have, is can this model spread? Who might be interested in doing this type of event? Hop onto our discussion list (cc-community) and/or blog about how you might do this type of event and link here for permalink trackback fun.