Rebooting the Welcome

Welcome from Studio Girin

Welcome from Studio Girin

We have not been very present on this production log, and we plan on changing this with a little more news soon. So we “reboot” with this nice drawing that Aryeom made, featuring both of us, and a few mascots that are kind of part of the team now. A good point to anyone who will recognize them.

Lately we have been calibrating ourselves, discussing projects… About this, we’ll soon update you about our next and first big project. So stay tuned!

Starting working with Gimp on Linux

This post is a re-interpretation (rather than a translation) of 김프, 리눅스와 시작하다, originally written in Korean by Han Aryeom.

Studio Girin‘s Art Director, Han Aryeom, had an academical education similar to many digital graphics artists: she used to be taught and work with the Adobe proprietary suite of software programs. Our first project (Firefox and You) was no exception (2 weeks to make it and no time to change one’s habits).

Recently though we decided to switch to a full Free Software workflow. This includes working fully under a GNU/Linux operating system. We chose Mageia.
And the current choice to replace Adobe Photoshop is Gimp. This is not the only piece of software we chose and tried for professional drawing. More posts to come about other interesting tools later…

Yet as you can imagine, after a dozen of years using daily the same program, it is sometimes hard to get over the habits: shortcuts, knowing which feature is in which menu, etc. After some research, we found this nice page, quite recently updated for the last version of Gimp (2.8), translating many shortcuts of Gimp into common defaults of Photoshop: http://epierce.freeshell.org/gimp/gimp_ps.php

Aryeom still made these few fixes (note: we could not find any contact for the author of the original list), relative to the last version of Gimp:

Category Photoshop Gimp
Select Deselect Select None None
Tools Crop tool Crop&Resize tool Crop

Other than that, we recommend this page for a change of configuration to any (former?) Photoshop user.
So if you want to give a try to Gimp as well, after years of Photoshop, but are scared of losing all your marks, this list may be a smoother way to begin with. Not exactly the same (because still a different program), but at least you’ll feel less frustrated for not being able to work as fast.

And just for your eyes, here is the first drawing she made with Gimp 2.8, which may (or may not) be a concept art for our next project. 😉

Enjoy!

Girin Studio is a Firefox Flicks winner!

Studio Girin presents Mozilla Firefox

As the first Studio Girin‘s official project, we decided last March to participate to Mozilla Firefox Flicks 2012, a video contest organized by the Mozilla Foundation whose goal was to present the foundation through a short movie. In short: Mozilla is a non-profit organization whose main action consists of Promoting an Open Internet. You may know in particular their web browser which has — in just a few years — become the third most used browser (about a quarter of the market): Mozilla Firefox!

The contest had 4 categories: Short Movie (less than 30 seconds), Public Service Announcement, Animation and New Technologies (Web/Internet technologies). We obviously participated in Animation category, but also in New Technology.

And we can proudly announce that we won the New Technology category.

Have a look at our submission in Animation category below:

The submission in New Technology is nearly the same animation (only about 10 seconds are modified) mixed into a specially crafted dynamic web page using HTML5 technologies: see the New Technology submission.
I hope you enjoy it. Do not hesitate to upload your photo at the top of the New Technology page to support Mozilla and have the pleasure to see your face appear directly in the movie!

We will probably conclude the adventure by publishing later a short making off of the animation.

P.S.: all media files we created (animation, music, voices) are released under a double license CC-by-sa 3.0/LAL; other sounds we use are also free; and any code is under AGPLv3.
In other words: feel free to reuse anything you like. If you do so, we would be happy to know, so leave us a comment!