LibrePlanet: Conference/2010/Hacking/Tube
Logline
A short 3D animation based, like the film Elephants Dream, in free software, Tube is also a new experiment in distributed collaboration. Tube plays on the ancient Gilgamesh poem — a primordial artifact of oral history and storytelling — in a variant of the hero’s progress that becomes the animation’s own frames.
Free Software for film production
Naturally we use only Free Software in production. This is primarily the 3D animation suite Blender, with the assistance of GIMP, Mypaint, Inkscape and friends. Of course we use Subversion for our asset storage, and Helga as a project manager/ asset manager. We are mostly running these programs in a free environment ( various GNU/Linux distributions). We also make free software: animation projects typically require a large amount of scripting - this falls under the 'technical director' domain. For Tube, we primarily rely on Python as a scripting language. Some of these scripts are part of our sub-project rigamarule - a rig-retargeting python script that allows tagging rigs with rules to facilitate deploying them for different models or characters. Other scripts are just miscallaneous helper tools- too small to call a 'project', but useful enough to share nonetheless.
Production Goals
Our plan is to make a short (5-8 minute) long animated film, using only Free Software for production The Film itself will be released as Creative Commons content along with it's 'source code'- .Blend files, images, composites, etc. Any scripts or software is to be released under the GNU GPL V2 or above- this allows it to be compatible for distribution with the programs we use.
Hackfest!
We're packing up our studio and driving to Boston to work on the project- we're mostly here to work, but have fun, meet interested developers and artists and hopefully invite them to join us, either by contributing to our 'upstream' software, or by hacking directly on tube projects. If you're already a developer for one of these projects, we'd love to meet- there may be some fanboyism or fangirlism involved, but it could be quite fun to see your project being used by artists to create something else- we hope at the very least it can be motivating, and a source of ideas and inspiration. Things we specifically need help with: Porting Rigamarule to Python 3.1/ Blender 2.5 API, and further enhancing/extending the script. We also would love to hear from developers interested in project/asset management for Film/Animation projects, to talk about their projects, or to join the Helga project. (Sadly none of us are Helga hackers, but at least we know who is and where to get the code)
