Here’s a short looping animation, just in time for the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – I’m taking part in a pop-up exhibition tonight at Baumhaus Berlin, organised by Jenni Ottilie Keppler, together with other illustrators, poets and sculptors. ‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ deals with cultural memory, and builds on two existing interpretations of the huia – which was one of three native New Zealand wattlebirds. The huia was driven to extinction before photography was prevalent, and before audio recordings could be made of its song. (The last confirmed sighting was in 1907.) The artist J.G Keulemans’ 1888 illustration of a huia pair appeared as a plate in Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand. His illustrations of native birds have become iconic representations, much reproduced in New Zealand and around the world. Keulemans was based in London and did not travel to New Zealand. Although he had done some work in the field, he mostly worked from stuffed skins – dead specimens, sent to him from around the world. The audible ‘bird calls’ are human imitations, recorded with Henare Hāmana in 1949. As a young man, Hāmana was familiar with the huia and had also been part of an unsuccessful search team in 1909. His whistles are created from 40-year-old memories. This animation that results is also a rather unreliable interpretation, hence the name ‘exquisite corpse‘ – its movement is based merely on videos of the Tieke, a surviving (though endangered) relative of the huia, which I’ve never seen in the wild. Further reading: Wikipedia’s Huia article is fascinating, particularly this section: “While we were looking...
About Prototype Fund Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Individuals and small teams receive a grant to test and develop open source tools and applications in the fields of civic tech, data literacy, data security and others. The Prototype Fund team support the candidates in their application process, keeping things as unbureaucratic as possible and adjusting it to the needs of software developers, hackers and creatives. In short: the Prototype Fund brings iterative software development and government innovation funding together. In the next three years about 40 projects will be funded. In total, the BMBF will grant 1.2 million euros in support of these projects. The video is based upon the design of the Prototype Fund identity and website, developed by the wonderful team at Rainbow Unicorn. I used Inkscape for design, Synfig for animation, and Kdenlive for editing. The video is © Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland licensed under CC-BY, and the music track, ‘Prototype Fund’ was specially composed and recorded by Javier Suarez (Jahzzar) of BetterWithMusic.com, and when used separately is licensed CC-BY-SA Jahzzar. You can find the music track and all project files for download and reuse on Gitlab. In addition to the video, each of the 5 word-pair animations were made into looping GIFs for use on social media, and I set up a graphic and edit template for the team to use for their video interviews which will be cut and published over the course of the 2-year project. I have also been making interview...
Op3nCare is a global community working together to make health- and social care accessible for all, open source, privacy-friendly and participatory. I made a number of short icon-based animations to be used in presentations, videos and websites to illustrate their themes. Source files for the animation can be found on...
I took part in the 5-week open source innovation camp, POC21 (“Proof of Concept”) in Chateau de Millemont near Paris, making weekly videos as we prototyped open source solutions to help mitigate and adapt to climate change. After the camp I turned the mountain of footage into a 60-min documentary, which you can watch or download here: Documentary premiere at Babylon Berlin. Listen to or download the soundtrack on the Free Music Archive: Proof Of Concept: 100 Geeks, 5 Weeks, 1 Future MISSING FROM THIS MIX the following tracks are free culture tracks not available on the Free Music Archive: Lizard Kisses – Little Things CC-BY-SA Azoora – Floating in the Sun CC-BY Jupiter Skydive – Duck Duck Goose – CC-BY Candy Says – Not Kings CC-BY-SA I should also do a special shoutout to Jahzzar and Broke For Free – if you’ve been paying attention you will notice I hardly ever make a video without their music popping up somewhere, and there are 8 (!) Jahzzar tracks in Proof Of Concept. Shorter, weekly videos made during POC21 can be seen...
In July 2014 I joined Tristan Copley Smith of Open Pixel and Open Source Beehives in Barcelona to make a documentary about the 10th annual Fab Lab Conference and Festival, which incorporates issues of the growth of Fab Labs and the potential next steps – for example, Barcelona’s Fab City project is an integral part of its plan to be an truly sustainable city within 40...
School of Data is an Open Knowledge project to teach activists, journalists, and citizens how to work with data- how to find good data, how to process, clean and analyse it, and how to present it effectively to tell a story clearly and truthfully. Above is the 2014 School of Data Summer Camp video, which I shot over 3 days at the Villa Adlon on the outskirts of Potsdam, documenting the first big international gathering of the School of Data community. The work that School of Data does leads to effective public awareness and advocacy campaigns, better data literacy, and leads to strong examples of the use of open data, making it easier to advocate for the release of more data under open licenses. I’ve done other work for them in the past, designing the School of Data Badges for integration with Mozilla Open Badges (a portable way of showing accreditation, skills and appreciation online) and I also made a video documenting their workshop ‘Wrangling For Watchdogs’ in early 2013. Credits School of Data Summer Camp Video CC-BY Open Knowledge Video shot and edited by Sam Muirhead Made with Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Kdenlive, Magic Lantern, Synfig, Inkscape, Audacity, Ubuntu Music: ‘Golden Hour’ & ‘Summer Spliffs’, CC-BY Broke For Free Map image Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons Badges Designed with Inkscape! Wrangling For Watchdogs There’s also a more in-depth version of this video (7min) Wrangling For Watchdogs – A Workshop with School of Data March 26-27 at Supermarkt, Berlin Video CC-BY-SA Open Knowledge made with free software – Kdenlive, Audacity, GIMP, Ubuntu Music: ‘Launching Pianos‘ CC-BY-SA...
