Category: ZeMarmot

So we are now in Saint-Véran, highest village of France (third in Europe) where marmots are just everywhere. For our first day there, we encountered quite a few marmots, made nice photos, videos and sound recording, and found some nice spots which may become a cool burrow for the hero of ZeMarmot.

Also thanks to Magic Lantern, the Free Software allowing us to do cool videos with our Canon EOS 50D (which had no video feature officially!).

Hop, a small preview video of a marmot getting its nose out of its burrow (CC Attribution 4.0 International):

We have started a dozen days of research for “ZeMarmot” Open Movie. By this, we mean we are going for a trip to the Alps, where we we will stalk cool marmots! Our goal is to get photos, videos and sounds, of marmots, other animal and awesome mountain landscapes. These will be used for reference for the animation film, to study marmot behavioral patterns, movements, get ideas, and so on.

We actually started in the Massif Central, the center mountains in France, since it was on our way south. We stopped by Mont Dore, where we hiked for a day the Puy de Sancy, since we read that many marmots were living there (reintroduced by mankind after disappearing… probably because of mankind anyway!).

Well the day was not the most sunny, and it was quite windy, so apart from some mouflons from quite far, we could not find any marmots. I imagine they would not get out in crappy days. I wouldn’t if I were a marmot!

Well… until the very very end, just when we were getting back, and when the rain started, a small ball of fur ran just a few meters in front of us! It ran inside its burrow, but we camped in front for a dozen minutes, and it slowly came out again. So for a first day, we were quite happy. We at least got our first photographs and videos of a marmot!

Now the bad news is that our 64GB UDMA7 CompactFlash card died while we were transferring all the photos and videos on the computer, the next day! We lost at least 71 photos (many of them of the said marmot unfortunately) and 1 video in my count, and maybe more, and we’ll have to buy a new one tomorrow, before we are heading to the Alps for the main part of the research adventure.

Well that’s life, I guess.

See you soon for the next update!

We had an awesome funding experience, but this is not finished. First because we still have a few hours left, so if you were planning on contributing and simply waiting for the last second, now is the time! Also because this is only the start of ZeMarmot adventure. With what we have funded, we are going to release the beginning of the movie in a few months, which we hope you will enjoy, then decide to continue supporting, financially or otherwise.

As of now we have 327 awesome funders from 36 countries, from smaller amounts to bigger ones (1000 €). Amongst our Silver Sponsors, 2 organizations officially support our project: apertus° (the first OpenHardware cinema camera makers) and Laboratorio Bambara (a research group on audiovisual art).
Our first ever Silver sponsor was Mike Linksvayer, former executive director of Creative Commons. We can also count Terry Hancock, Free Software Magazine columnist and director of the Open animation serie “Lunatics“, among our funders, and other contributors from well known Free Software or Free Knowledge projects: a long time GIMP developer, Simon Budig; a Mozilla employee, Xionox; a Creative Commons employee himself on a movie adventure too, Matt Lee; GCompris maintainer, Bruno Coudoin… And I’m sure I missed a lot of people.
Also several teachers from various universities, even a bookstore (À Livr’Ouvert) backing us officially, fellow artists, some using Free Software (like Tepee), people from the cinema industry (an executive producer for instance).

Of course the GIMP project has been supporting our project all along…

As well as Libre Graphics World, reference for Free Arts-related news…

BlenderNation, linuxfr (French-speaking Free Software news), Framasoft, GIMPUsers, the VLC project, and so many others.
We were also featured in wider audience news website as Numera and Reflets, and even in television on TV5World, and twice on French FM radio.

Tristan Nitot (former president of Mozilla Europe, now Cozy Cloud Chief Product Officer), Free Software foundation, Creative Commons shared our project on various social networks or blogs.

Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation chairman, called our initiative “a Libre movie project with the right spirit”.

Now I’m just name-dropping. That’s because we were impressed by all this support. Yet let me be clear: you are all as important to us! Everyone of you. You show us that Libre Art, independent films and Free Software are cool and have a chance. Because seas are made of each drops.
We love you all.

Animal characters in our movie are in-between real animals and usual anthropomorphism that you would find in common animation films when animals are main characters.
So yes our Marmot wanders with a bindle on a stick. Yes he wears a bandana around the neck. But he does not speak! You won’t find any speaking animal in our movie (well unless we meet parrots maybe!). We even have a scene in our current script where Marmot will end up in a human city… as comfortable as a Marmot would be in a real city: not very!

This is a scriptwriting choice we made long ago, even when we were still thinking making ZeMarmot as a still comic. And though this was not a secret, this is — I think — the first time we reveal this here so clearly. This makes animation direction and music that much more important in our movie.

This is what inspired this “Wilber & Co.” joke. If you don’t know, “Wilber & Co.” is a regular comic strip we release in GIMP Magazine, drawn by Aryeom, script by both Aryeom and I. And if you don’t know even who is Wilber (or Tux), this is the mascot of GIMP, the awesome software for drawing and manipulating images we use and contribute to (and Tux is the mascot of the Linux Kernel which is also our Operating System core of choice).

I have now started again to work on ZeMarmot’s script, and while we won’t share too much details immediately, I thought it was interesting to expose some of our script choices. 🙂

Also in case you missed the news, ZeMarmot’s crowdfunding got extended by the platform so you are still encouraged to contribute if you wish to be part of an awesome 2D animation film under Creative Commons BY-SA/Free Art, made with Free Software and with a cool story (well I write it, of course it is cool :p)!