Big news: I have dedicated Words and Thoughts in RGB to the Public Domain.

As with Life is Change, I waived all my rights to RGB through the CC0 Universal Dedication — it’s Free as in ‘Freedom’. This means the video is truly yours to use as you please. Downloads are available at Archive.org. Enjoy!

Recently I made the decision to dedicate a few of my older videos to the Public Domain. This meant getting formal permissions from the people who contributed to the making of those videos and a small amount of reediting to replace those bits that weren’t PD-kosher (i.e. stuff I used that had Creative Commons licenses).

Life is Change is the first of my videos to go full-blown Public Domain (through the CC0 Universal Dedication). Even though many web services encourage their use (and some don’t even allow you to check a Public Domain option) I am not at all interested in the common Creative Commons licenses, as I feel these encourage a ‘free-ish culture’ with strings attached. I believe your stuff should be either free or not free. Public Domain or Your Domain.

So enjoy Life is Change: Remix, redistribute, do whatever you want. I have made some downloads available at Archive.org. They’re yours.

Science news this week are all about the almost certain discovery of the Higgs Boson. From what I gather that’s big news, even if my understanding of particle physics is also in an infinitesimal scale, so I go with the explanation that the finding of the Higgs particle closes and vindicates the Standard Model of particle physics in pretty much the same way the discoveries of elements such as Gallium, Ytterbium or the noble gases in the late 19th century vindicated the atomic model and Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table.

However, I find myself in utter lack of awe at such discoveries. I think it’s sad all cutting-edge science nowadays seems to deal with the negative Powers of Ten, the infinitesimal, starting at nano and working its way down. It feels as if Mankind is retreating, into Earth, into tinier and tinier spaces. That’s not to say the study of the infinitesimal isn’t interesting and without awesomeness — just look up stuff on quantum levitation or Bose-Einstein condensates — but we also need to look at the stars — at the positive powers — for inspiration.

Hence The Voyagers by Penny Lane. Go watch it in silence. Let’s not retreat into tiny holes in the ground.

Synesthesia by Terry Timley (2009). A wonderfully surreal short film.

A Brief History of John Baldessari is probably the very best mini-documentary I’ve seen recently. Narrated by Tom Waits and directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the guys who made Catfish. This is not boring art.

While exploring the farthest reaches of some external hard drive yesterday I found this b&w test render of the portuguese version of Change Your Habits Today. Somehow I like it more than the orange-cast original (or probably I just got bored of it). Naturally I’ve uploaded the find to Vimeo.

Basil Wright and Harry Watt’s influential 1936 documentary Night Mail.

Tomorrow the first public showing of Damião* will take place at 6:30pm in the Teatro Nacional S. João, here in Porto. The short film is a ‘mockumentary’ about the watchman at an abandoned shopping mall. It is an adaptation of the play Damião das Chaves by Pedro Estorninho, who also plays the title character.

I’ve just finished a trailer. The song is Dandy by Carlos Gardel, and, despite what YouTube’s bot police tells me, it is very much in the public domain.

* If you don’t speak portuguese, do us a favor and please pronounce it ‘Damien’.

Logorama, by François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain, won the Oscar for best animated short in 2010.

If you happen to be around Venice, Italy next Friday (September 2nd) night, be sure to check out a screening of Change Your Habits Today at the Circuito Off Film Festival.

Yes, it may be true moneymaking necessities made my filmmaking career take a backseat to multimedia and hired video stuff, but it’s not entirely out yet. In fact, I’m ready to announce that I expect to have new film called Damião will be ready for premiere by the end of September. More on that soon.