Happy new year Creative Commons fans.

Our first year over, and the Commons Hostage has met it's aims and produced well over twelve different episodes over it's first twelve months. Just look at this list of completed episodes:

* Santa Game
* Ontological Odyssey
* Reddit's Best Joke In Musical Form
* Audio Book of "Do Dream Sheep Bleat?" - FIVE episodes released
* Subgenius Video Ministry on The Conspiracy
* Song based on an apocalyptic dream
* Video of the Sci-Fi party
* A game based on "Joust"
* A video series called "Upload" starring Kaye Conway - TWO episodes released
* A novel about Conspiracy and Consciousness

Ch Ch Ch Changes

This month we announce some changes at the Commons Hostage web site.

You are now able to buy digital downloads of the full serial of completed projects, with the money spent going towards the fundraiser target for releasing the parts freely.

For example, the Do Dream Sheep Bleat Audiobook is complete, all it's parts are recorded and ready to be uploaded. However the fundraising target to release all parts isn't yet reached. So at the top of the page is a "Buy" button and for just two pounds you can buy a DRM-free (of course) download of the entire audiobook for just two pounds.

If you do so, your two pounds will go towards making the other parts free.

You get a complete audio-book, we get money towards releasing the stuff freely.

And to celebrate the change, we've donated cash to make the next part of Dreamsheep freely available too! You can find part six along with the previously freed first five parts on the Dreamsheep Audiobook Project Page.

And of course you can buy the whole unabridged complete audiobook too!

The Comming Year

We've made these changes becasue we're changing direction slightly this year. Rather than putting out a new project every single month, and asking you to fund the development of new parts, we'll be working harder for longer and producing higher quality fully completed serials less often

These will be available for paid DRM-free download from the first day of release, hense the changes to the site.

We're aiming for four this year, and the first should be ready around the end of March. It's a novel written by Craig Stone ( @robolollycop ) and Adam Priest ( @revPriest )and it's under heavy editing as we write.

So fewer projects, but of higher quality with the complete serial available for download from the day of release.

Check back around March, or sign up to be notified at the top of this page.

It's December, which means it's officially nearly Christmas. If you wanna do your Christmas shopping online, you should really have done it by now to be sure everything will come on time.

This project was built as an experiment to see what happened if I started coding with no other aim than "Build something Christmassy from Creative Commons art.

I ended up with a web game in which Santa's bar is invaded by a bunch of pirates and Santa has to run around keeping them happy by plying them with Rum so they don't get too rowdy.

You can play it here: http://dalliance.net/xmas2011/

I started by looking through the creative commons licensed pictures on Flickr, looking for things with a Christmas theme. I found this picture of santa:

I decided to turn that into a sprite and make the sprite run around the screen. So I chopped off his arms and legs, separated them out into different images, and loaded 'em into Flash, building a sprite that could walk around and jump.

Now what should this little Santa character do exactly? Running left and right while being able to jump was fun, but too pointless for any kind of true art work.

Since he was clearly a drunk Santa, I made him able to throw bottles around. Which was nice, but still not enough.

So I searched again. This time, now knowing it looked like I was building a game, I found opengameart.org , which is a fantastic resource for sharing sprites and 3D models etc. I liked the fact they forced their users to use licences which explicitly allow commercial work based on derivatives. Disallowing commercial work bans even putting something on a webpage with an advert, and I expected to post the results in the usual places where adverts often appear. I suspect that commercial banning also means you can't use it in work when you expect to ask for donations to build upon or continue that work too.

There I found this pirate: http://opengameart.org/content/pirate

He looked lovely, so I loaded him into Blender to see what I could make him do. He didn't have any bones to make it easy to move him around, and since my blender skills are basic at best I thought it would be a good opportunity to try and learn to put those bones in him.

I did it fairly poorly, inexpertly, and certainly without using most of the features which Blender supplies. However, it was eventually good enough to allow me to pose the little pirate and have him do more or less whatever I wanted.

So I sat him at a table sourced from the same opengameart.org site, gave him a bottle of beer and imported that into the game.

Of course it was horrible. The pirate was 3d, the Santa was 2d. I rigged a fake isometric transform into the position of the objects so they at least existed in a pseudo-3D environment. Then I had a bunch of pirates sitting around which Santa could move between. But I was no longer happy with the Santa at all.

So I decided to see if I could replace the Santa character and found this great little blender character: http://www.blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/santa-clause/

He was funny, and already had bones to make him easier to move. Even change his facial expressions. I animated him to walk around and throw bottles.

He was too squat for my pirates, it turned out, but just tweaking the _yscale variable in flash dealt with that easily enough.

Collision detection is a pain. Especially in a hurry. Banning Santa from walking into those tables in a pseudo-3D map was a fairly tricky programming challenge. At least it was the first time I did something like that. These days I know you can fake it pretty easily by just moving the sprite to a point at the edge of the bounding circle. So I added that in, and faffed trying to remember the maths for a while until I resorted to getting a pen and paper out to do high-school trig problems. Never think these things aren't useful in life kids. Geometry is everywhere.

Of course this wasn't enough in the end, when I started placing pirates in overlapping positions. Santa could creep into one table by walking around the edge of another. Not good. Last-minute repairs just freezes him when he's touching two tables. This seems to work well enough.

With a bit of code to make the pirates happiness change depending on when they had a bottle, drink when they were happy, and throw the bottle away when they emptied it, I finally I had some sort of a game going.

Sound effects were, in general, easily done by quickly sampling things with my phone. Record a sound file, drop a bottle on the floor, clap my hands, band the desk. I used Audacity to chop them to size and save them as .wav for Flash to import. Breaking glass though wasn't something I wanted to do so I found a shatter noise someone else had already kindly uploaded: http://soundbible.com/105-Light-Bulb-Breaking.html

Still seems a bit flat and lifeless though, what it needs was music!

Now my band ( http://handsomejacks.co.uk/ ) were planning to play a gig at which we would play a Christmas song. I decided to film that song and project the video from it onto the wall in Santa's virtual bar. Santa was presenting a film to pirates! Pirates decide the success of films by deciding whether to bother copying them around or not. If they like the film, it could be a viral hit. Plot sorted.

Then on the night of the gig, someone in the bar upstairs got into a serious fight and ended up (according to rumour) with broken glass pushed into his insides. Horrible. The police were called and the entire venue shut down (despite the downstairs bar where we were being fairly separate) just as we were about to strike the opening chords on the first song of our set.

Damn. No chance of using that video then.

So I searched Jamanendo for some christmassy music, finding just two albums there which seemed suitible. Both great, one even funny:
J.E.L.L.i (here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/56441 ) is hilarious and Anthony Viscounte (here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/81276 ) is swingy and fun.

Now it was time to build the bar to host this all in. I searched Flickr again for some pictures of bars and found this one:
which seemed to fit the bill. Flat-on texture of a bar which I could take segments from to use as textures to build something in Blender.

It needed more though. I built the beer-pumps myself, the first Blender model I've made from scratch. Then found a tree in the blender green house which Yorik made here: http://yorik.uncreated.net/greenhouse.html

I made some tinsel and xmas tree decorations in Blender myself, then added a big poster taken from this picture:

Finally, all was in place so I uploaded to GitHub and released the game.

https://github.com/revpriest/Jack-s-Xmas-Game

I think the experiment was a success. I learned more about Blender than I previously knew, found repositories of creative commons artwork which I didn't know existed, discovered probably my favourite version of "12 days of xmas" ever, and produced a game which is mildly entertaining for long enough to listen to a song.

It's called "Jack's Xmas Game" in github coz it was going to be featuring a band video when I first uploaded. That didn't work out but we're playing a gig again this week, and I will attempt to record that one and stick the new video into the game rather than just having a Christmas poster and some music. Look out for a special edition next week sometime.

Now you may play the game

Hello Creative Commons fans!

This month we've been busy beavering away with some animation, and have (for the first time I think) relented and used some non-free software in the production of this little existential tale.

"Oscar's Ontological Odyssey" can be found here:

http://oscar.commonshostage.com/

It stars a florescent felt crocodile named Karl, and his friend Oscar who, it turns out, doesn't really know what he is. Their conversation about that fact soon becomes mired in existential questions and doubt until the two set off on a quest to finally sort out the nature of existence by vesting the mysterious Penguin.

The felt creatures were made with a cheap children's toy felt kit, which were then digitized with a simple digital camera and edited using the Gimp to break them down into their component parts for animation.

Next, once the script was written (with no improvisation help from @robolollycop despite his promise) with trusty Vim and then recorded and edited into shape with Audacity. The squelching mud sounds were recorded with a hand full of washing up liquid and water, squeezing the palms together.

All that remained for the sound was to find some suitable background music, so a quick search of the Soundcloud CC archives found a "Fingers In The Noise" track, the first third of which, looped, gave the piece the slow and plodding mood it needed. Thanks to Fingers In The Noise for that, you should check out their other songs, they have quite the variety of music.

With the soundtrack in the can, or on the hard-drive, it was time to begin the animation process. After a short time being frustrated and confused by ktoon, and with time (as always) a factor here we decided that we'd resort to using proprietary software, since we already knew more or less how to do ahead with that. Luckily, we already had a license to use it since we need it for our day-job. So "Flash" was launched, PNG images imported and the slow tedious process of animation began.

The whole scene was animated as a huge 1900 pixel wide-screen thing, with the intention of moving it over to Cinerella, our video-editor of choice, for pan-scan and zooming later to make the visual scene more interesting.

Exporting that file to Cinelerra was more tricky than we had first hoped. Every time we used Quicktime to export the movie, Cinerella (and indeed every application we tried) refused to see any actual video or audio streams within the file. This was annoying in the extreme. Eventually, after much frustration, we found that exporting it into iMove, and then out again (still through quicktime) produced an avi file which we could actually get non-Apple products to recognise.

Animation, it turns out, is a slow and tedious processes which is almost as slow and annoying as trying to get computer applications to recognise each other's data.

Still, all this is complete now, and so we're able to present to you "Oscar's Ontological Odyssey". If you like it and would like to see episode two created, then donate. Only twenty pounds in the tip-jar will ensure episode two's publication around a month after we reach that target. If you can't afford to donate, forward the link to all your richer friends, or just spread it around and retweet it. The more people who see it, the more likely we are to find generous sponsors for the next episode.

Hope you enjoy this month's film. See you next month.

This month our video series "Upload" received funding for it's second episode, so we're happy to show you "Upload Part Two - birthday"

Lacking the kind of specialist studio or lighting rig needed to do chroma key filming, we resorted to a cheap imitation: The Microsoft Kinect camera.

This web-cam has a laser range-finder built in, meaning that for every pixel on the screen it knows not only the colour, but also the depth of the surface in the image. Obviously it's then fairly easy to write the software to just turn every pixel beyond a certain depth green, and use that to chroma key in Cinelerra.

Trouble is, the camera lens and the range-finding lens are not one and the same, one being a good few centimetres to the left of the other. This means that thanks to parallax effects, each has a slightly different vi
ew.

Adam built some custom software to scale and shift the views in order to get then roughly aligned, but this is never going to be a perfect job. Luckily, the entire point of the green-screen scenes is to project the image as being computer generated, so a bit of blockiness is fine, and when we add Cinelerra's hologram effect and a bit of other video trickery the final result does indeed look pretty computer generated.

The backing music this episode is a Creative Commons track from Portuguese artists "Zen Baboon", which seemd to suit the moodiness and darkness of Sam and Eve's little argument.

Part three of "Upload" will be produced if 20 people donate another pound, or one person donates 20, or indeed any combination of donations that bring our tip-jar up to a total of 30 for the serial. Check out the fund raising page at http://upload.commonshostage.com/

This month, Adam's imaginary penguin was embodied in the form of an animated felt system and it forced him to sing a song based on whatever turned out to be the top post in the Funny subreddit.

Here's the result.

The felt creatures were made with the help of Laura on a lazy day while watching TV, with scissors and felt and glue. Though the glue mostly didn't even work really and the bits are in fact held together with simple friction. Pictures of the finished creatures were edited in the Gimp to remove the background leaving us with PNG files with transparencies.

The video was shot in one continuous take from two cameras, though not the first take, certainly. The finished video streams were loaded into Cinelerra and synchronised by ensuring the clap at the beginning (later removed) happened in the same place on both tracks.

Playing this through earphones, the penguin voice was added (and the script adjusted to make his words more or less fit into the inadequate spaces Adam had left in the video shoot).

Next the pictures of the animals were added, dragged out to be visible for the entire length of the video tracks, and then scaled and translated into position with Cinelerra's projector automation.

Then we come to the tricky bit: moving the beak and the trumpets. Cinelerra has a 'rotate' video effect which can be applied to clips, setting the key-frames at various points gives the beak the ability to move when the penguin talks, and the trumpets to move while the brass band play.

With all this in place, we rendered the front-camera complete with animation.

To move the animals into the correct place for the side-camera, a perspective transform was applied to each of the animal PNGs. Luckily, this kept the rotation data in place so there was no need to redo the animation for moving the beak etc. and the side-view with animation could be rendered quite easily.

The closeup view for the brass band was taken in a separate shot of the cushion and simply zooming on the PNGs with the projector automation again.

At last, all three shots were in place and a new cinelerra project was started with a track for each of these three completed video sources. Playing through while creating key-frames for muting each of those tracks got the first rough cut of the video finished, and that was refined more later.

Andi came in to play the kazoo for us, which we recorded twice and overdubbed for the brass band.

Finally, the camera automation keyframes were tweaked to do a bit of panning and scanning over the video sources to make the shots seem less static and dull, and a little animated perspective effect done over the little jingle at the end of the brass band playing.

The final result: Adam gets to talk to his penguin, and /r/funny gets to see it's top post rendered in song.

As Adam says in the video: we're really not terribly interested in doing this again, but we can be bribed to do so if enough people chip into the tip box.

People have indeed done this for "Upload", which gathered enough tips to make part two this month, and so next month we will have the next chapter starring Kaye Conway and Adam Priest as Eve and Sam, her dead uploaded granddad.

This month I've written the first chapter of the novel that's been vaguely coming together in my head over the last few years really. In a lot of ways it feels like everything I've done over the last few years wasn't so much a diversion from writing this book as the research for it and background work needed to publish it any half sensible way.

I first started plotting and planning this novel in about 2007 when I felt the urge to write something again after my first book "Yes! The conspiracy really exists and furthermore it's all your fault". I started pulling notes together, plotting and planning, only to discover that the main characters from the book needed some kind of modern scientific religion to preach. A rational and sensible guide to improving your own mind, and the minds of those around you. So I started doing some research to figure out what kind of a thing that might be.

Which was a project on which I got a little side-tracked and built The Transcendence Institute. I experimented on myself and read around to understand more about minds, psychology, neuroscience, brain-plasticity, neural networks and the like, publishing four books and 48 guided meditations along the way.

Of course The Transcendence Institute is not the church from this new story. The church in the story is fictional, even if it's based on real research.

When that was done, the very next month, I started the Commons Hostage, the software I needed to serialize digital artworks and release 'em under a creative commons redistributable copyright licence.

It seems to me that an artists should want as many people as possible to see their work, to be influenced by their art and that the traditional ways to gather money from art are counter to that interest. Using copyright to artifically limit the number of copies of a work in order to raise it's price actually reduces it's value. A work is worth less if it can't be shared.

Six months and six projects later (I don't detail them again, I did last month) and I finally get to write the first chapter of that story, and breathe some life into Jack and Albert and the gang. Hope I get to write some more of it still, but that's now in your hands. Is chapter one good enough to chip in and help raise the fiver I'm asking for to write part two?

Read Chapter One Of "The Jobbins/Jones Hypothesis" and find out!

Since this is the first newsletter from the Commons Hostage, it seems as though an introduction of sorts is required.

The front page of the site tells most of the story. The Commons Hostage is an attempt to find a payment model for freely copyable digital art works. Books, films, music, drawings, radio plays, software, anything that can be digitized and serialized can be put up for free on the Commons Hostage alongside a fund-raising thermometer. The artists promises to make the next part only when the donations are up to a certain total, marked on the thermometer.

Now rather than trying to stop copying, it's in the artists interest to encourage sharing of their work, for this spreads the message and may bring in more donations for future work.

That's the plan anyway.

We've been running for six months now, and the project-list is starting to be fleshed out.

In January we released the "Do Dream Sheep Bleat" Audiobook, a nine part recording of last year's paper publication. It quickly raised funds enough to release chapter two, then chapter three, then chapter four, then chapter five. More donations are needed to secure the release of chapters six though nine.

In February we released Rev Priest's Video Ministries, a mock religious broadcast from The Church Of The Subgenius's own minister, Rev Priest. Entitled "The Conspiracy" this video sermon is the second such video from Rev Priest, available alongside 2009's video "Parable". If just 25 pounds are donated, we'll produce a rant on Yahwey!

In March, I recorded a song based on an epic dream. A bored reporter find himself in an apocalyptic situation, and meets a prophet who rescues him. This is a four parter, and just ten pounds from one person or one pound from ten will secure part two's release.

In April, we released The Starship 491 Part One - a documentary into the events at the Sci Fi party in October 2010. In the first of two episodes, the guests are welcomed aboard the ship, a space-princess joins the cruise and her precious jewel is stolen by pirates! In part two there's a proposal, a dashing rescue, and an epic finale. Will the extra twenty pounds be raised to see part two edited together? Only you guys can decide that.

In May, I wrote a game, "Joust Adventure", in which a stuffed-toy monkey mounted on a stuffed-toy parrot jousts evil monkeys to rescue his girfrield. The game is pretty difficult, can you get to level two? And will anyone donate the one pound required to secure the production and release of level two?

Last month, we produced the first episode of "Upload", a sci-fi story staring Kaye Conway and Adam Priest in which a girl video-conferences with her dead grandfather. It's released TODAY! So watch it as soon as you can and then decide if it's worth chipping in towards raising the ten pounds we're asking for the production of episode two.

Last month we also finally upgraded the website's graphics thanks to new graphics and buttons from John Park, so the site looks a lot cleaner and fresher now.

If you want to be updated on our future work, we'll be releasing a monthly newsletter, shorter and more to the point than this introductory one, go to http://blog.commonshostage.com/ to subscribe to have it dropped into your email box, or your newsreader via the RSS feed, or just keep on checking back on the first Wednesday of every month.