Cactuses : An Open Movie

Cactuses is an Open Motion Picture created by some twenty-four High School students and five college students based in Manteca, CA.The idea of Cactuses derived to turn the production process of a feature length motion picture into a productive learning experience for a crew made up entirely of students.And the project also aimed a high quality production, above the expected standards.



Story of the Movie

Cactuses is a story of a young man named Simon whose life of rejection and broken relationships takes a turn when he meets an older woman named MaryBeth who works at a cactus shop.

read more..


Production of the film



The movie was taped in 2002, this is the result of a non-profit movie making venture that interned 24 high school students and and five college students throughout the production and making of the movie... read more

Release of the Movie

The movie is released using BitTorrent Technology which is already exceeded 2,000,000 downloads.The movie was released as a DivX encoded file reaching almost 1 gigabyte in size.The movie is also available in Google Video, so it could be viewed without download, or download with a smaller file size.

Click here to Watch the movie online with google video.

Click here to Download the movie from Vuze (An open entertainment platform).This is a High-Quality version of the movie with 809.97 MB size.

However the movie is not completely Open Source, see the license. They don't allow further enhancements or editing in the movie.

Tips for Downloading the movie.

If you have a low bandwidth connection and you need to download the movie, better download from the Google video (306 Mb).You can download Google videos using KeepVid. Just copy the url of the google video and paste in the KeepVid and click the download button.You can either download the low quality flv version or the medium quality mp4 version.

You can use Azureus (Vuze) torrent client or Utorrent for downloading the high quality version of the movie from Vuze.

CinePaint : Professional Open Source raster graphics editor

Some of my friends who work in the film industry asked my what open source can offer for them ?
So I decided to introduce some open-source tools available for Film industry (Hey the first OpenMovie is out there!)

CinePaint is an open source raster graphics editor, it is one of the most successful open tool in feature motion picture work today. CinePaint is started as a fork for Gimp 1.0.4 version. CinePaint has so far been used for films such as Scooby-Doo, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, The Last Samurai and Stuart Little.

Why CinePaint ?

The first reason for why I prefer it is because it is an open source software (think of Photoshop, Corel Draw,etc and their cost!), that means this is free and you can even customize it for your personal needs. And yeah we all know this is a good software since it is already used for several movie projects including the Harry Potter.Now it is your turn to find out why you need it, try it before you decide .

Features of CinePaint ?

CinePrint has vast dynamic range : 16-bits per channel (64-bit RGBA)

• that's more range that can be displayed on a computer monitor,since the computer monitors are 24-bit RGB, and it is important when working with a film.It helps to prevent loss while editing.

Still Photographers and CinePaint

• With 35mm support it helps still photographers too. Still photographers can think of CinePaint as having many more F-stops of range .CinePaint also handles 8-bit, 16-bit linear, and 16-bit float images.
• CinePaint features the support for loss less formats such as TIFF,RLE,Cineon, and EXR, this helps the photographers to preserve the details of their photos without any loss, remember some of these formats are not even supported by Photoshop Gimp or other tools.

Other Main Features

• Frame Manager
• Onion Skinning support
• 16-bit floating point support for HDR and 16-bit colour managed work flow for photographers and printers
• Available in the following platforms: Linux, Mac Native, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Windows XP (Windows version is however broken now, a new version is in progress.)

Cons of CinePaint

I just tried out Cine Paint for a little image editing and found it is a little bit cluttered while considering the GUI (even though with expose feature of mac we can take advantage of this).But still it is a pretty good tool with a lot of features and it is pretty easy to learn this software even without any help.

You can Download CinePaint here