Mathieu Saura, better known as Vincent Moon, is one of the greatest and more respected filmmakers you can find, nowadays, licensing his work under Creative Commons, allowing its use and remix for derivate works. His work is available for free on Internet, he is a nomade artist building an audience on social media and keeping his projects alive by donations (crowdfunding).
Early on his career – not using Creative Commons, yet – he became known adapting filmmaking style ‘cinema verité’ to document bands playing one or few songs off the stage, on acoustic, in streets, parks, flats… anywhere. This music video subgenre, that was known as ‘Concert à Emporter’, or Take Away Shows, started in La Blogothèque. The list of bands Moon’s lenses captured includes: Arcade Fire, Phoenix, REM, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, St. Vincent or Bon Iver.
More filmmakers came after him, who adaped the idea worldwide.
From Spanish venusplutón! to Canadian Green Couch Sessions, to only name a few. By then, Moon was more focused on profile artists’ creative process in full-length films under Creative Commons licenses.
An Island and Esperando el Tsunami presented an unorthodox way of distribution: official public-private screenings, promoted through the website, that people could attend or host.
Furthermore, in the music label Petites Planètes, Moon and his friends collect the music from artists he met worldwide. This collection includes not only videos releases, but also audio files available on Bandcamp. As an example, Peret is one of the greatest exponents of ‘catalan rumba’ and Moon got the chance to met through his colleagues in Barcelona (Spain).
If you had not enough, you can find more videos, under chronological order, from early 2000’s till now, in his website.
He also has a photoblog: Photos from the Moon.
Header photo by Antje Taiga Jandrig (Wikimedia Commons)
This post was published on CC-licensed (February 21st, 2013). CC-licensed is a blog about Creative Commons, created as part of one of my courses while studying abroad at Thompson Rivers University (Canada).
#fromkamloops is the blog, in Spanish, about this experience abroad.
Oriol Salvador 