photo credit: eschipul Our first 'meetup' entitled "Open Source Films - Jathia's Wager"  went great.  We discussed in detail what the next steps of the project much to my excitement have decided to shoot a 2 minute prequel to Jathia's Wager THIS WEEK and put the raw footage online and send it to 2 teams (could be more if we get more collaborators before then).

It's going to be one simple scene from Jathia's youth were he's talking to his girlfriend, we'll release the script very soon. The response so far to the project has been excellent with volunteers on all ends of the experience spectrum and from different places around the world.  If you read my Open Invitation to the Creative Content Community you'll see that I invited them to join us and they've happily responded with a resounding yes ( See Response from Creative Content Community - The Collaboration Begins with Green Screens) In our meeting I spent a considerable amount of time speaking with Rich a mythologist at the Center for Symbolic Studies.  He's has some blender 3d experience and because he's living in New York would like to get some young artists together to see what he could do for digital animation effects, possible drawing over and enhancing our original footage.  He would like to assemble a small team extremely quickly to produce some digital animation and effects for an initial 2 minute scene.  The push in the next week will be to get this scene shot, edited and released so Rich, the Creative Content Community, my team in LA, and anyone who would like to contribute will have access and can show us what they can do or work with us in teams to make a beautiful and feverishly fast open source movie. He also mentioned the possibility of creating the entire production with open source software as well and I'm definitely onboard for that as I support open source (this site is using wordpress multi-user an open source script) and I have a machine running ubuntu.  Linux is not my strong point so I'll need to make sure I have the collaboration and support if we move in the direction (but I'm personally all for it).  Of course individual contributors can use and are encouraged to sue whatever software they have / know, but the final renderings , cuts and the source file releases could be done entirely with open source software.  I don't want to make any guarantees as of yet, except to say I'm for it and if I get the support I require would be very happy to move in that direction (now is the time to decide so if you're a linux user and want to help with the film JOIN NOW). Note on file sharing and hosting - To release the HUGE video and source files required for Jathia's Wager I'll be setting up an account with http://megaupload.com/ which should give us a terabyte of shared storage space and that can be expanded if necessary.  Too much to type, if you missed the meeting please try to make the future meetups (we have both in person and virtual meetings).