Sita Sings the Blues sourcefiles online

Nina Paley, creator of the wonderful and copyright-fraught animation Sita Sings the Blues writes, "All the Flash authoring (.fla) files I used to make Sita Sings the Blues have just been posted on archive.org, under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Want to know how I got a certain animated effect in Sita Sings the Blues? Open up the .fla files and find out. Want to put flying eyeballs and demons in your next music video? Now you can. Want to make a 'Sita Sings the Blues' video game using all the assets? Go for it. (But I strongly suggest you negotiate my endorsement if you want to actually market the end product.)"

"Sita" Source Files now on Archive.org (Thanks, Nina!)

[#1 posted by thekinginyellow, August 20, 2009 7:48 AM]

wow! i can't wait to dive into this one. i love seeing how others animate and how things vary from my own processes. thank you so much!

[#2 posted by jjasper, August 20, 2009 8:10 AM]

Nina, you are so awesome you deserve a monument!

[#3 posted by batu b, August 20, 2009 10:05 AM]

The style is so similar to this artist:
http://www.coreyhelfordgallery.com/preview/ramos/
What's up with that? Is there a "Disnindia" subgenre I've been missing?

[#4 posted by Anonymous, August 20, 2009 11:03 AM]

Also, for those in the San Francisco Bay area who would like to see this awesome work on the big screen, the whole film is playing at the Red Vic on Haight this weekend: http://www.redvicmoviehouse.com/show.php?pageid=778

[#5 posted by jimh, August 20, 2009 11:14 AM]

I saw it at the Red Vic the last time it played- If you're local I highly recommend seeing it on the larger screen! Thank you so much Nina, for this Wonderful Thing.

[#6 posted by Roy Blake, August 20, 2009 12:46 PM]

I saw the film in the theatre at Chautauqua this summer. Anyone who takes this much trouble to open-source her film deserves to also make a little money from it. Great film!

[#7 posted by GeekMan, August 20, 2009 12:47 PM]

We have lots of Indian-Western cross-culture in Vancouver, so seeing Sita Sings the Blues was a wonderful experience for me and my friends. I wasn't familiar with Ramayana before I saw Sita; now I'm recognizing representations of Sita, Rama, and Hanuman all over the place.

Thanks to Nina Paley for creating and open-sourcing this wonderful film, and to BoingBoing (among a few other sites) for bringing it to my attention.

That's all!

[#8 posted by Egypt Urnash, August 20, 2009 1:43 PM]

I am really glad to see her walking the "free culture" walk! This is where a lot of proponents of Creative Commons as an analogy to open source seem to stop, just saying "yeah it's okay for you to remix the finished end product of my work" without handing out the source files.

[#9 posted by Anonymous, August 20, 2009 1:46 PM]

This opens up wonderful new possibilities. How about an operating system with the sita theme...that will be sweet!

[#10 posted by Anonymous, August 20, 2009 2:04 PM]

DAMN - this is a beautiful gift. Thank you so much Nina.

[#11 posted by GloriaRandal, August 20, 2009 2:33 PM]

Oh my god, this is just great! I gotta get this for my kids!

[#12 posted by Anonymous, August 20, 2009 5:45 PM]

Why use the youtube version of Sita when it's available from archive.org?

[#13 posted by jimh, August 20, 2009 6:25 PM]

My guess would be simply because Youtube is embeddable. And what's above is the trailer, not the feature film, of course.

[#14 posted by Anonymous, August 20, 2009 8:44 PM]

At no time should anyone be linking to PBS. They are locked down, pure streaming only unless you have the software to break that. I want to watch on my time. I realize that Sita is on archive.org, but their other stuff isn't.

[#15 posted by Ocker3, August 22, 2009 3:42 AM]

I dearly love this epic movie, I'll be buying a copy next paycheck

[#16 posted by Anonymous, August 31, 2009 4:23 PM]

Sita sings the blues grest movie,excellent music and animation and is also now available on DVD! Get it from Amazon or Netflixsy