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.
Since we started to publish information about “ZeMarmot” project, some of the questions which often came up have been about planning and budget: how long will it be, how much do we need, and so on.
Well to answer this, we need to answer first: who are we? The answer: nobody.
Right now, this project is fiercely and intensely led by 2 people: Aryeom and Jehan. We told you who we are, our backgrounds and such already. And that’s it. We are not multi-billionaires and would not be able to hire anyone by ourselves.
What it means is that we are entirely relying on the success of the upcoming crowdfunding, which can have 3 possible outcomes:
1/ A big failure. Nobody cares, we are all sad, and we leave for other adventures. Let’s knock on wood.
2/ A huge success beyond expectation. We all hope this, but we don’t want to get our hopes too high.
3/ Anything in-between. The most likely.
Of course we could try and do it the usual way: find producers, sign contracts. But when you do this, you lose a little of your soul. We would not be able to release under a Libre Art/Creative Commons license. Granted, I did not try to ask many producers about what they think of these kind of licenses; you can try and tell me how it went! If you find or are a producer who wants to fund us with millions, go to Hollywood with our movie, and in the end release it under a Creative Commons BY-SA, just contact us immediately! 🙂
Also another of our goals is to use and improve Free Software. Now let’s be honest a moment: a full stack animation studio using Free Software cannot be immediately as efficient as a full stack Proprietary-equipped studio (with Adobe suite and such). This is how it is, no need to lie. But as long as someone does not try it, it will stay this way. You need some people willing to make the step and try it, and accept a few caveats in exchange of freedom, but not saying “too bad, you can’t change how things are”, but instead: “let’s fix all the issues”. This is the bet on Free Software: they are not perfect, but you can make them so. Proprietary software are not perfect either, far from it, and they also have a lot of issues. But the bigger issue is this one: you can’t fix them! If you want something different, if you want to improve things, this is near to impossible. Your workflow has to adapt to the tools. I want the tools to adapt to our workflow!
So after this huge digression: if we were to go the financial-worthy way, with a producer and all, we could just go the easy way, pay huge license fees, and be like any other studio.
But this is not how we chose to do things: we want to release a Libre movie, we want to contribute back to Free Software, therefore we do this project with a non-profit organisation, without a normal producer, and we take the risk of it crashing, with the hope that it will fly in the sky instead! Let’s get our movie fly in the sky!
Therefore, what about our business plan? How long will be the movie? How many people would we hire? This will all depend on the crowdfunding, i.e. on you.
If we get just 10 000 EUR, this would likely just allow us to do a small movie of a few minutes, without music composed especially for this movie (but we could still use existing Libre music). And this will be quite disappointing (but still funny) adventure. And most likely we won’t be able to hire anyone with such a low funding. If we get 100 000, now we are speaking! Then we really expect to be able to give back a lot to the community: improvements in Free Software, a nice movie, people hired to work on painting, lighting, animating and editing on Free Software (and therefore giving feedbacks and bug reports on problems, rather than just complaining, and fixes when possible!), documenting…
There is no max limit. We all know how much movies cost. And before all they cost human time! And I doubt that we would get millions anyway (unfortunately!). Even the Blender Foundation tried with the Gooseberry project, and they were not able to raise as much as expected. And who are we compared to the Blender Foundation?
But I knock on wood, and hope we can get enough to make a good movie. Yet only when we finish the founding will we be able to say for sure how long the movie will be.
What I can say is that my synopsis accounts for a story up to about 45 minutes. But that’s very long for a self-produced movie, so if we get low funding, we may change the scenario into a small episode (calling for more?), or a shorter story. We will see.
Finally let’s conclude on a note about quality: someone told us he was ready to do music without being paid for the “Open” side of our project. Well if we get nearly no funding and have not enough to pay for custom musics but we decided to still do a 2 min movie (to wrap the project with something at least), we would not say no to volunteers for one song. But if we get real good funding, it is important for us to pay people.
One of the things we promote here, and with the LILA association, is to reward properly professional work. There are cases when you can work for free (for very good causes without money), and other times where a work has to be paid properly. “ZeMarmot” is not meant to be a “hobbyist” movie, made with a few ropes and drawings from someone’s daughter. This is meant to be a professional-quality job. And we don’t want people to mix up Free Software and Libre Art with “amateurish” or “low quality”.
No, at the opposite, we want people to be able to acknowledge Free Software and Libre Art as possibly “professional” and “awesome”! 🙂
If you believe the same as us, I hope you will follow our adventures, and push the project forward!
So I started a small crowdfunding for mirror painting in GIMP some time ago. It took some time since I had other priority (like our ZeMarmot film project) and my only time restriction was to get it out before GIMP 2.10 is out. And I knew it would take some time anyway.
Also I wanted to do things well. I know that some people were complaining that I could already release the code from the early demo I showed a video of, long ago. But seriously this was horrible crappy broken code. As a developer with some self-respect, I would never release such a code publicly, which was clearly done only to give an “idea” of what it could look like, not for solid code base of a good application.
Well I finally reached this state of a solid code base. I actually saw very quickly the need for something much more generic than just “mirror” painting. So I implemented what I called a generic “Multi-Stroke” feature, though Mitch did not like this naming at all and proposed to just call it “symmetry” (which I, in turn, don’t think defines the feature well, since it allows more than only symmetries, but well…). Basically from a single stroke coordinates, a “symmetry” would outputs 1 or more strokes (at different coordinates, but also with optional brush transformation too, using the new GEGL engine of GIMP).
With this base feature, which takes most of the code, I implemented the originally funded mirror symmetry, as well as a rotational symmetry, and a tiling symmetry (once the base code is there, adding any kind of “symmetry” is just a matter of minutes).
Well a video is worth any words. So here is the current state of the code:
For those who are interested into the resulting code or want to test, it is available publicly in a branch (hopefully soon to be merged to master): https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/?h=multi-stroke
Probably the next step of such a feature would be to have an API to allow plug-in developers to easily implement their own symmetries. I believe this would not be very complicated to implement too.
Enjoy!
