February 26, 2010
7:00 PM – 10:00 PM
403 Stockton St, Suite 101
Richmond, VA 23224
www.onetribe.nu

And a poster!

If you’re in Richmond, you should definitely make it out. If you’re not in Richmond, you should definitely still make it out anyway.

Speaking of websites, to go with the book, I’ve prepared a companion website with a whole heap of content – including images, GIMP files, and at least one python script – that you can use while going through the book. In the coming weeks, I’ll also be producing some video tutorials to accompany the book as well. You find all of that stuff on the companion site at www.gimpbible.com. Also, if you happen to stumble across an error in the book, send me a message and I’ll update an errata page for that chapter so everyone can stay up-to-date.

That’s about it… I’m pretty excited. This is my second book and it’s almost twice as long as my first. It was an intense project and I’m eager to find out what other folks think about it. Oh… also, I have to put out some big thanks on this book. Rob Shimonski, my co-author for GIMP Bible, did an incredible amount of work in a short period of time. I’m also honored that Melody Smith and Chris Hoyer provided me with a veritable library of photographs to use in my example figures throughout the book. Although you can see some of it on gimpbible.com, you really should check out their websites for examples of their excellent work. I also need to thank David Revoy, Tina Keller, and Rennett Stowe for the images of theirs that I also used in the book. Happy reading. Feedback welcome!

Gah… doing this update makes me realize two things:

1. I need to draw more.
2. I should probably update my gallery software from Gallery2 and migrate to NextGen. Maybe when I find some time…

We finished!!

Yup yup yup. Long story short: we completed 4 minutes of 3D animation in Blender in 48 hours. And it came right down the the wire, too. We turned in our film, rendered and ready to rock with a mere 10 minutes remaining. And here’s the really remarkable thing: we started off this year with even less than we did last year. This year, all we had when the project started were two partially complete character models (they were missing their mouthbags, otherwise known as mouth interiors). These models weren’t rigged or textured or anything. Furthermore, we didn’t have a set or any props modeled, either, and a lot of our crew wasn’t available for the full 48 hours. Here’s the result, with a couple bits of polish, rendered in HD (and below that is some “making of” information):

(If for some reason it’s not playing here, you can direct download the MP4 or watch the short on YouTube or Vimeo)

It was due to the huge bucket of talent and dedication in our team that this was able to be finished. We have some absolute machines in this crew. It’s incredible how much work was done in such a short period of time. Everyone pitched in; often doing more than a single person’s fair share of work. The interesting thing is that animation didn’t really start until late, late Saturday night. An incredible number of frames was cranked out in that short period of time. I can’t say enough how honored I am to have worked with all of the people on this team. Not only that, but I’m still surprised that they actually agreed to participate in such a ridiculous idea.

To get an idea of just how hectic the weekend was, have a look at these timelapse videos that Hal Dowdy took while we were working. They’re each about 8 hours worth of footage crammed down into one minute of time. It’s pretty amazing.

There are a couple highlights that I’d really like to focus on here, though. One of them is Bassam’s new Rigamarule rig-retargeting script suite. It took Bassam roughly 5 hours to rig our Round character. However, with Rigamarule, the same rig was retargeted to Square in about 20 minutes, most of which was dedicated to cleaning up vertex weights. Without Rigamarule, we would’ve started animating much later and probably would not have turned the short in on time. Bassam just released Rigamarule 0.2 on the blog for his Tube project. If you’re a Blender rigger, I highly recommend that you check it out.

Besides our talented crew, the other element that made this production possible were our renderfarms. In particular, I’d like to mention the Animux renderfarm that Mark Puttnum runs as well as the very cool people at BlenderFabrik. Without these two farms and the small team of “farm hands” to wrangle them, there’s no way that we would’ve gotten this thing done on time. The best we’d be able to pull of would be OpenGL previews… and who wants to watch that?

A somewhat surprisingly helpful piece of technology for this project was TinyChat. Since most of our real-time production discussions happened via IRC, it wasn’t a huge production tool. However, it was great for morale. Since most of our team was located elsewhere throughout the world, it was an incredible help to be able to see everyone else working (and freaking out as the deadline loomed closer). It was also a great way for the outside world to watch our production as it happened. We actually recorded most of the video from the TinyChat session, but I haven’t really gone through all of it. Multiple cameras at over 48 hours of footage it going to take some time to look through. I promise to eventually post something, though.

All in all, I had a great time. We finished. It got screened with the other 48 Hour films, and we’ll find out the results of the judging this weekend. I’m not expecting too much. We’re at a bit of a disadvantage by doing animation for a challenge that was designed for live action filmmakers, but I feel that this was an incredible accomplishment. I can’t wait to do it again.

Hand Turkey Studios is going to allow live public access to our production as we compete this coming weekend (17-19 July) in this year’s 48 Hour Film Project in Richmond, Virginia. We assembled a team and competed last year with the ambitious goal of completing an animation as our submitted work (and, yes, we’re animating in Blender). Due to some technical difficulties last year (discussed in more detail in a presentation at the 2008 Blender Conference), we missed the deadline. However, the entire international team of talent from last year (plus some new additions!) has returned to do it again! And we’re amped to make this thing awesome.

As part of that goal, we are allowing public access to our work environment during the weekend of our production. Since our team is located throughout the world, we collaborate on our project through the Internet. We’ve opened some windows to that process so anyone can follow along as we make our animated short… four of them, to be exact:

• The Hand Turkey 48 Hour Film Project Wiki – This is our central collaborative tool. Brainstorms, sketches, designs, task lists and workflow descriptions all live here. Check out the Recent changes page to see the latest updates.
• #ht48hfp on freenode – We use IRC as our main means of real-time communication. If you have a preferred IRC client (Chatzilla, mIRC, Xchat, etc.), point it to the #ht48hfp channel on freenode.net. If you don’t have a client, you can use freenode’s web interface.
• Follow us on Twitter – The entire team has access to update that account, so any of us can let you know what’s going on.
• Streaming webcam footage – We are actually going to stream footage from webcams at the locations of some of our international team members so you can watch the craziness that ensues. We’re still hammering out the kinks on this, but we’ll have a direct link set up by Friday.

That’s it! Come watch us slave away this weekend and wish us luck! Also… if you’re in the Richmond area and you want to provide us with coffee and food, we won’t complain!! :)

And now… we’re back! The entire team from last year has agreed to return and we’ve even got a few more added to the mix. The event will take place on the weekend of July 17th. It’s going to be ridiculous and crazy and coffee-filled and awesome. I can’t wait.

Idea Paper:

Sketchbook 7:

Some things I know for sure:

• We’ll be using Blender pretty heavily as our production tool.
• There will be some substantial pre-production going on and perhaps a test run.
• When the project is complete, I want to release the production files under a permissive Creative Commons license (still verifying that this is possible with the 48 Hour Film Festival people).
• It’s not likely that I’ll be sleeping very much that weekend.

Of course, I’m not sure whether or not we’ll be successful at completing the animation, but I believe we can do it and I’m totally up for the challenge of trying.  At the very least, we’ll find out just how good we all are.

Oh, and the actual screening of the completed films is scheduled to take place at the Byrd Theater on July 26th.  You should all make it point to come out for that.

Wheeeeeee!

Sound like fun? I mean, it’s pretty intense and there’s not likely to be a lot of sleep going on, but it’s certainly doable. So why did I make the subject to this “A crazy idea…”? Well… not only am I considering registering, but I think it’d be a fun challenge to create an animation in that 48 hours. Sure that likely means more work and even less sleep, but I’m just sick enough to think I might enjoy it.

If I do this, though, I won’t be able to do it alone (crazy I might be, but even I have my limits). There will be a fair amount of prep work necessary (the live action folks have actors, sets, and locations already in existence, for the most part… the least we could do is model some basic generic characters and sets). Also, I’ll need a pretty fair amount of help with sound… voice talent, music, and sound effects/Foley. And it’s always great to have creative input on all sorts of things.

So… who thinks this is a good idea? Who wants to help? You don’t necessarily have to be in or from Richmond to participate… and as far as I can tell, there’s no limit to the size of the team.  You just have to have a willingness and desire to go through hell with me for a weekend… and hopefully make something pretty cool (and relatively unprecedented).

Whattya say?