Now you can help us elaborate on “Bird Song: A cartoon requiem for DRM,” our Digital Rights Management animation.
Below you’ll find links to all of the raw audio, video, and image files you need to proceed with your mashup. Let us know if there are any other formats that might be helpful. All of the elements, as well as the video itself is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license with an open
invitation to use, share and modify as you wish, as long as you share your production, don’t use it for commercial purposes and give us (and those before you) a nod of recognition for getting it started.
As for how it was made, we’ll let the designers speak.
Islam Elsedoudi, art direction and design:
We mainly used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator for the animation and GarageBand for the music.
All the illustrations were drawn in Illustrator using the pen tool for the sleek drawings and the pencil tool for the sketchy drawings. We then brought them into After Effects and built “sets” in a 3D environment with a camera. We put a light source on the background to maintain realism and texture. The solid components of the piece (bird, globe, leaves, chandelier) were treated to look as if they were painted on the background.
The background texture remained consistent and unmoving, while everything else moved as it would in real space. Some of the more crude animations, such as the line rolling into the record and the bird cage falling were conventionally animated, frame by frame, using Illustrator and and a lot of screenshots.
DRMs are often designed by ambitious, well-funded consortia, with top-notch engineers from every corner of the industry. They spend millions. They take years. They are defeated in days, for pennies, by hobbyists.
- Cory Doctorow, Guardian Unlimited
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Sure, it’s probably too early to dance on the grave of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but we can certainly continue pounding nails in its coffin after Wal-Mart drove a stake through its heart this week. And that’s not counting all the garlic, silver bullets, and hemlock showered on DRM recently by Apple, EMI, Amazon, and Universal (not to mention “consumers”). It’s still twitching and gasping, and we may have some zombification ahead of us, but the tipping point is nigh. You can smell it.
In 1999, a scientist wanted to look at some data from soil samples collected on Mars in 1975 by the Viking lander. He wanted to test a theory about detecting the existence of Martian bacteria and microbes–in other words, finding life on Mars. The scientist thought he would find what he needed on a NASA website somewhere, but it wasn’t that easy. The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes that stored the data were found, they were “in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.” Someone finally found a ream of paper printouts propping a door open and humanity’s understanding of the universe expanded a bit more. » Read more
