Happy Birthday! And more…

Hello, everybody! Have you miss us? ^__^ Today is 30th of May and it’s fourth birthday of Morevna Project! Yay!

One year ago I have published quite depressing report where I was ranting about situation in the project. Now, horizons are clearing, lots of things got sorted out and got in place. Let me outline the main achievements of this year.

• We have got a good equipment. Yeah, this year we have put some money to get tablet screens. And you know what? Of course I did expected that good hardware will influence our productivity, but I haven’t imagined that impact will be that strong! Just WOAH!
• We did a few commercial jobs. The first half of last year  me and  Nikolay dedicated to producing some commercial works. That was one of the key moments  to establish our confidence. Of course we used the same technologies as in Morevna Project. It was a very good chance to polish our workflow and most importantly – to see our real capabilities. We got aware about the  amount of work we can handle (in fact it’s really impressive for ourselves) and that allowed us to get a pretty clear estimation on how much time we need for some particular tasks. That allowed us to bring Demo production schedule. And of course commercial work brought us some funds that we have been able to put into project.
• I’ve made up my mind. That was a very important step for me – rethinking my life goals and priorities. Deep inside I’ve always knew that Morevna Project is a such kind of thing that cannot be done “on spare time basis”. The question  was brought to the table “Is Morevna Project ever going to be finished?”. Well, personally for me the question was a bit more global “What am I going to achieve in this life?” It wasn’t about  Morevna Project only, but about the whole my open-source-related activity.  Am I going to make it a major direction in my life? Or am I going to spend my life doing the regular job and having regular income, regular stability and bla-bla-bla… You might guess by the intonation what my answer is, but can you believe how much time it took to get to this? Damn, yes, I want a miracle in my life! I know that there’s no miracles in this life, but then I’m going to make it. People ask me about motivation. Here’s my motivation. M.I.R.A.C.L.E. I just want to take a risk and try by putting everything into Morevna and see how this will turn out. ^_^
• Nikolay Mamashev step in as key artist. Of course all those events/decisions are hardly to happen without Nikolay. He always been a great participant of the project with great ideas, skills and vision, but this year  he become a real striking part of Morevna. Proving  his skills and dedication every day, he made the whole work on redrawing keyframes and is ready to continue with tracing and animation. Definitely he is one of the persons who make our goals possible.
• We have run a donation campaign. When it gets to money, that means things are getting serious. This step means that there’s no turning back. There’s no chance I would take it if I wasn’t true sure that we have enough resources to achieve our goals. This step means that there are people who can work on this project and they are willing to dedicate majority of their time to it. This is a big difference in situation comparing to one year ago and that makes me especially happy.  Yes, the donation campaign is failed. But the donation campaign allowed us to complete another major stage – we have all keyframes for the Demo now!
• We’ve got some publicity at LGM. LGM is awesome event gathering developers of libre graphics software from all around the world. This year I was kindly invited to participate. And I have to say – this event is a blast! I’ve met a lot of awesome beautiful people, had a lots of talks with developers and enthusiast artists there. Much time we dedicated discussing Synfig and its development perspectives. As you might remember, Synfig is another key to success of Morevna Project, so contributing to its development is one of our strategical targets. We need to be sure that Synfig will continue to evolve in all aspects – code, documentation and other infrastructure parts. No need to say that I came back inspired and full of new ideas.

So what’s next?

The big news that the time is now, and today we’re starting the next stage of Morevna Project Demo development – “Vectorization and Tweening”!

For 3 months we are going to vectorize all keyframes into shiny-looking images. This process will be combined with tweening, so at the end we are going to get smooth animation for all characters in the Demo! At this stage we will heavily rely on Synfig Studio, which is our main and only software for doing such kind of work.

No, we won’t run new donation campaign – this time our plan is try to break through with what we have. Though, if someone really want to get some of rewards from previous donation campaign – you are always welcome to contact us. ^__^

Before a real vectorization will begin, there’s a lot of preparation work have to be done. I need to import all keyframes drafts into  shot files, compose them together according to the layout and timing. Then also I will need to set up all stickmans on top of the drafts and animate them. Also, for some shots I need to prepare a lot of animated guides – it is necessary to have them to avoid uncontrolled deformations. Only after all those steps are done for shot, the real vectorization starts. I will start with those tasks today and Nikolay is going to join my efforts on 10th of June.

That’s all for today. Happy Birthday, Morevna Project! And let’s rock a new year!