Arts and Everything
So we just launched the crowdfunding for our 2D animation film, “ZeMarmot”!
You’ll find a small 1-minute teaser there. We hope you’ll like it.
As already explained, it will be made fully with Free Software, even the music as we work with a collective of musicians working with Free Software as well, and it will be released under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (double licensed Free Art).
What not to like?
To know more and support us, go get a look to the crowdfunding page!
As a GNOME foundation member, I (Jehan) got this log subscribed to planet GNOME a few days ago. So I figured I might as well make a small “hello” message to present myself. 🙂
I am mostly here as a GIMP developer. For full disclosure, though I regularly use GNOME 2, I never “really” used GNOME 3 (I actually really want to try it but my current distribution is not very GNOME 3-friendly unfortunately). Also I regularly change desktops and window managers anyway.
My main contributions to GNOME projects, other than GIMP itself, are related to me hacking on GIMP.
If I have to cite my patch on GTK+ I am the happiest about, it is probably one most people will never hear about nor notice, since it is GTK+ 2-only. But still I want to believe it changed the life of many GIMP or MyPaint users! Indeed with no hotplug available before GTK+ 3, when unplugging a graphic tablet, a GTK+ 2 application was crashing! Since MyPaint and GIMP are used by a lot of people drawing with a tablet, this was a very very embarrassing and silly issue, also very bad (crash means data loss, and hand-drawn data is usually not perfectly reproducible). Since waiting for the switch to GTK+ 3 (an ongoing process but due in 2 major GIMP releases!) was not a suitable option to me, I worked around the bug, and at least GTK+ does not crash anymore.
When we started using Exiv2 through GExiv2, I helped their migration to autotools, allowing the project to be easily cross-compiled, which soon became a project under GNOME umbrella itself.
I have also various patches in babl, GEGL, pango, and other non-GNOME project like fontconfig, gettext or even autoconf itself, all of these contributions as a consequence of me hacking on GIMP.
Finally I have quite a list of bug fixes and features on GIMP itself of course, but I won’t list them all here.
For more details about various of my contributions to Free Software, and not only GIMP-related, this OpenHub page about myself is not exhaustive but gives a good overview.
In the end, I hack on software not only because I like this, but also because I need these as a user, or for other users, and I prefer to do things by myself rather than wait for someone else doing these when this is important to me. Therefore why I initially started hacking on GIMP was to help Aryeom, and now we are able together to start our project of a film animation fully with Free Software.
I still remember that the first times that I showed GIMP to Aryeom, it would crash for no good reason (for instance because the USB cable of her tablet would sometimes be loose and unplug for a hundredth of second, yet enough time for an X error to occur and crash GTK+, as explained above). So I was so happy when I could fix this crash and other instabilities. Obviously I am far from alone. Mitch in particular, GIMP maintainer, still does 100 times what I do, and without him, GIMP would not be where it is now. I am quite happy to bring my little stone to build this huge and wonderful bazaar which is GIMP, and I sure hope I will be able to continue to do so for years and years!
Finally I’ll conclude by writing about our project of animation film, since I think it could be a major cogwheel to my world domination plan! ZeMarmot could be the first 2D animation film made fully with Free Software and released as Creative Commons BY-SA. I don’t believe it to be an easy goal, but I am helped with Aryeom, a very skilled animation artist, AMMD, a collective of very good Libre Art musicians, other artists, developers, Free Software or Libre Art supporters, and a lot of friends who want to see it happen too. So let’s get it realized!
And that’s it, for who I am! At least a little part of who I am, since as anybody else, how can you sum a person up in one blog post?! But enough to hope I get you interested.
Hello world planet GNOME!
Good news everyone!
You may remember that we were looking for musicians in the last weeks. Indeed “ZeMarmot” wants to give a real important part to music, since there won’t be any dialogs (marmots don’t speak human langage!) and also because we love good music.
Today we are very happy to announce officially our association with the AMMD cooperative of Free Artists! This is a very awesome cooperative of professional musician gathering nearly a dozen active bands, who all release their songs under the Free Art license (a license officially compatible with Creative Commons BY-SA).
Also they have their own professional recording studio, and — hold onto something — fully fueled by Free Software! You read it well: you can do professional recording and mixing with Free Software and professional musicians can make a living using Free Software, just as you can for professional graphics.
The AMMD will be in charge of composing original soundtracks, musiciens, recording and mixing to make “ZeMarmot” an even awesomer movie.
So — if not mistaken — I think we can say that if “ZeMarmot” can get funded, it will be the first animation movie ever FULLY made with Free Software, from the Operating System, to the graphics, the editing, and even the sound and music! How is it for a big step for Free Software?!
P.S.: we had many other feedbacks and discussions with artists, so thank you to everyone who proposed their services. Know that we don't rule out totally having other musicians if needed, and we are still in discussion with some interesting people who contacted us and that we may optionally work with additionally. The AMMD simply stuck out amongst all the contributors since their usage of Free Software and similar process and ideas on Libre Art really agreed with our project, and also because they do really great musics (don't hesitate to have a look at the AMMD website).
Henri Hebeisen is an awesome Blender artist (Blender Foundation certified trainer). The association LILA worked with him when he participated to the Libre Calendar 2015 printing project; and if ever we raise enough, he may work on ZeMarmot with us if we need support from a 3D expert.
As you all know, ZeMarmot is a 2D movie. So you may wonder why would a Blender artist participate.
A 2D animation is indeed about drawing and painting for the most part. Nevertheless when you work with computers, it would be stupid to completely ignore all the technical advances brought by 3D technology.
For instance, if the film is long, on some complex scenes with a lot of changing perspective (moving vehicle with camera “inside”, etc.), it may be wise to help our animators with some 3D-rendered scenes to draw over. Lighting also is a complicated topic in painting and 3D technology made it a lot easier, especially dynamic lighting can make static art a lot more alive.
In a movie like ZeMarmot, we really want to keep the awesome feeling of hand drawing, this raw and warm sensation on the eyes, but we don’t exclude helping some scenes with 3D technics if needed. This is a shadow job since, when it’s well done, it has to be subtle and only support the 2D. You can give more life to a background for instance, but you still want people to see these as painting. Just a more lively one. Therefore we are happy to announce getting the help of Henri in our project!
Below one of his awesome full 3D artworks.
