You may have heard of the movie Sita Sings the Blues. It's an animated film which tells the classic story of Rama and Sita, with music by 20s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw. And if that description doesn't thrill you, well, you're not me.
I saw the movie a few weeks ago thanks to my friend Kevin, who found a download for me (ahem) before the official release. I loved it. Funny, touching, wonderfully animated. And the Annette Hanshaw songs, all classics of Tin Pan Alley, aren't just background music; they're integrated into the story.
The film achieved some notoriety when when it ran into copyright problems over the music. It's complicated; the Annette Hanshaw performances were all public domain, but copyright still applied to the songwriting credits. (I might have that wrong actually. Except the part about it being complicated.) Filmmaker Nina Paley was finally able to work out a deal with the copyright holders, and on Sunday released Sita Sings the Blues for free under a Creative Commons license.
Since it's a great movie, and it's free, I decided to do a free giveaway of DVDs for my show. Making the DVDs wasn't hard, just time-consuming. The Sita Sings the Blues download site was sooo slow. I tried to download the largest file & gave up after about 8 hours. Then I tried the SD version, which took about 3 hours to download.
I found a program called MPEG2 Works that does all kinds of DVD related things. It works great, just, you know, takes a lot of time. The "one click DVD" option took about 2 hours to build an .img file, though I did it wrong the first time and accidently made it in PAL instead of NTSC. Then burning the .img file onto a DVD takes another hour plus. It's a good thing I have two computers or I wouldn't have gotten any work done this week.
Once I had the master DVD, it was off to Joe's house. It's good to have a friend with a CD/DVD duplication business! He burned copies 6 at a time while we made the labels with an image from the Sita website. Joe liked the colors so much he made an extra for himself, to show clients. It was a trade: I'm going to make a slide show of photos of wolves for him. It's for a client who works for an environmental group. They have a CD of wolf sounds and they want a slide show to go with it.
The DVD isn't perfect: there's some blurring when the animation gets complicated, like when there are a lot of objects on the screen moving at the same time. Also, this is kind of weird but the aspect is correct when I watch it on a computer, but on a TV the right and left edges are cropped off. Like pan and scan, except no panning. I did it over, making sure to select the 16:9 aspect, and it was the same. Finally I thought, screw it. I've spent as much time on this as I can spare. Only a little of the image is lost. And besides, this is a free DVD. If people are unhappy with it, they can download their own.
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