Save "Sita Sings the Blues" from the Flash format: can you convert FLA?

Feb 04, 2010, 13:33 (4 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Terry Hancock)

[ Thanks to Steve hill for this link. ]

"Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues” is becoming a huge critical success, and may even succeed financially, which is unusual for any independent film, but virtually unprecedented for free culture films (“Sita” was released under the CC By-SA). There’s only one sad thing about this for free software fans, and that’s that “Sita” was made using proprietary software, and the “source code” is in a proprietary format: Adobe Flash’s “FLA” format, to be precise. Paley has posted these files on the Internet Archive, but she doesn’t know how to translate them into any free software friendly format (and neither do I). Can you help?

"Like Sita trapped by the evil Ravana, the source data for “Sita Sings the Blues” is trapped in a proprietary file format which makes it very hard for derivatives to be made using free software tools. Want to help rescue it?

"There’s no question that Flash is the leading tool for free culture animators at this time. I wish I could say it was Synfig or KToon or some other free software tool, but it isn’t. “Sita Sings the Blues” is only the most visible case."

Complete Story

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