It's a miracle that Nina Paley's feature length animation, "Sita Sings the Blues," escaped a life sentence. Sadly many films never do. Great music enhances film and video. Digital video editing tools make it easy to add popular music and remixes to a film. Unfortunately, permission to use commercial music in an independent film is not easy to acquire. Filmmakers, who sync commercial music to their films planning to seek permission later when the film attracts investors, are often devastated to learn that the music is unavailable or prohibitively expensive.
Filmmaker Nina Paley is one of the lucky few who find a way to keep their films out of copyright jail. A veteran of syndicated comic strips, Paley began creating short animations in 1998. Inspired by a Ramayana tale she encountered while living in India, Paley spent 5 years creating "Sita Sings the Blues" by hand. Along the way Paley was attracted to similar themes of romance gone wrong found in Annette Hanshaw's 1920's blues recordings. Paley did some research and concluded that her desired recordings are in the public domain. So she developed her animation to sync with Hanshaw's recordings and entered "Sita Sings the Blues" in several film festivals. As it often happens, Paley won awards and was soon offered distribution deals.
Unfortunately, Paley then learned that the songs Hanshaw sang in the recordings were not public domain. Click to continue...
