By the way, today is the fifth anniversary of morevnaproject.org. Happy Birthday! ^__^

Suddenly I’ve got a letter from Shuttleworth Foundation:

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have been nominated by Jonas Öberg to receive a Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant to work on your projects. … We tasked our Fellows to seek out and nominate an impressive change agent, who may not be able to concentrate on their brilliant idea yet. This grant is for the sum of $5,000 and will be awarded to you personally to bring that idea forward.

I was really shocked about this and honestly I would think it’s someone’s joke, if it would not mention name of Jonas Öberg, who I’m happy to know personally. In any case, the money are here now and I’m enormously thankful to Shuttleworth Foundation for such an amazing act of trust and of course to Jonas Öberg for recommending me.

What does it mean. It means that at least the next half of the year I won’t need to waste my efforts on doing commercial jobs to make my living. Instead I can use all my time to concentrate on my animation-related open-source activities. Consequences will follow.

Where the money will go. Considering the analysis given in my LGM report, it’s pretty logical that those money will go for Synfig development. I am going to put them for establishing the full-time development. It was mentioned that Synfig doesn’t have a “human resource gap” for that and I’m going to fill that gap by myself. Yes, that means I’m moving to Synfig as full-time developer.

This is not an easy decision, because the real full-time dedication requires sacrificing my other projects – at least for significant period. But talking about Morevna Project, let’s be honest – we have no resources to start the production of new episode in closest future. It’s not about money resources only, we have significant technological gaps that needs to be filled before. And the success of activities in Morevna is highly depend on the stability of situation in Synfig. So it’s not really a sacrifice – it’s the necessary investment into our future.

In fact, the decision of me moving to full-time into Synfig was already taken a weeks before today. We have discussed situation with Carlos López González and come to conclusion that I’m the only one who can make this step at the moment. Today everyone works on Synfig in their free time only. My goal is to show  how one full-time dedicated person can influence the development. This should allow to give an estimations of results for a certain amount of sponsorship, which is necessary for attracting an investors and thus establishing the stable funding. The stability of funding would allow to expand the count of full-time employed developers and when this happen I believe  my presence in the project will not be that crucial.

So, it is really important which results I will be able to show during this period. This is an awesome and exciting experiment, and thanks to the Shuttleworth Foundation it’s going to expand to the new scale. In the period of my full-time dedication I plan to make the process of development as transparent as possible. Most likely that will be done in the same way as we did for Morevna Project Demo – in the form of weekly reports. Also, in November 2013 I will publish a report, summarizing the results for the period.

Unfortunately, due to my current obligations I can’t move to full-time immediately – I need time to wrap up my current project and finish some tasks. Thus, my work on Synfig as full-time developer will start on 1st of August 2013. But June and July months will not be wasted! You probably remember another priority outlined in my LGM report? That’s it, as an investment into Synfig development, the part of the funding will be used for producing training DVD! (or whatever medium that will be – DVD looks so much outdated now). The main part of this work will be done by Nikolai Mamashev – he will record all the visuals and make the editing. My responsibility is the content planning, methodical assistance and general directing. And Julia Velkova is ready to give us a hand with translation into English and narration.

That’s my rough plan. Of course life can bring some corrections, but I think you got the general outline. Let’s together celebrate the beginning of the new phase and… back to work! ^__^

It’s ten days passed by since the new version of Synfig Studio got officially released but I guess it’s never too late to announce it here. ^__^

Synfig Studio 0.64.0 splash screen by Nikolai Mamashev

This release includes the brand-new cairo rendering engine, as well as our improvements – simple plugins system and disabled keyframes. That’s it – the features developed during the work on Morevna Project Demo now officially included into Synfig and this is a significant milestone for us, of course.

Download Synfig Studio 0.64.0

And yes, Synfig isn’t crashing anymore when you try to disable keyframes. ~_^ The new version also includes the stickman template, available as a plugin called “Simple Skeleton”. That means the stickman is now a part of Synfig Studio and will be updated with its development. Though, we do not exclude possibility of publishing more alternative versions of stickman, but they will be provided as Synfig plugins from now.

Read the complete list of new features

As many of you know, this April I was happy to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) event in Madrid - the largest conference for free software graphics application users and developers. Much thanks to all community members who made this trip possible!

It took some time for me to analyze the results and have everything settled in my mind. So, today I would like to present a personal report about this event.

This was my second experience of attending LGM. Previous year I have attended LGM in Austria and gave a talk about Remake usage. This year it was a bit different. My plan was to give a workshop about the usage of character template that we have developed lately. Another important thing is that LGM was attended by Synfig’s main developer – Carlos López González – so my target was to have a meeting with him for a productive collaboration.

Also, I have decided to expand the benefit of my trip and organized additional Synfig workshops on my way to LGM. There were two workshops in St. Petersburg for “Regional Center of Quality Evaluation in Education and IT” and one in Moscow for the “Moscow’s Institute of Open Education”. The first workshop in St. Petersburg was about technique of cutout animation in Synfig. The second was advanced one about the usage of character template (same as given at LGM). Moscow’s workshop was about cutout animation only. All workshops are turned out great, we had a lot of discussions during the events and I’m happy to see a good trend – there is a growing interest for Synfig as alternative to replace Flash in Russian education.

During my stay in St. Petersburg I also got a chance to visit “Melnitsa” – the biggest animation studio in Russia. That was really good experience for me.

By the way, the interest to use Synfig in education is not a Russian-only trend. My workshop about the character template was at the very first day of LGM, and besides the conference members there was a lot of students from the art academy. Right in the middle my workshop was interrupted by the fire alarm, but in general it all went fine.

(photo by Peter Westenberg)

(photo by Carlos López González)

(photo by Maria Leandro)

Unlike the LGM talks, the workshops weren’t recorded, but in the last two days of LGM I was invited for a live broadcast at Experimental TV and I’ve took that chance to re-record the workshop contents as a screencast. As result – you have my workshop available as tutorial online now. The live broadcasting was very fun and people told me that it was a longest session in the history of Experimental TV.

This year the LGM was attended by 5 representatives of Synfig community:

• Konstantin Dmitriev (me, aka Zelgadis)
• Carlos López González (aka Genete)
• Jerome Blanchi (aka d.j.a.y.)
• Timothée Giet (aka Animtim)
• Manuel Ospina (aka Mospina)

In the third day of LGM we had a development meeting (BoF), where we discussed a development priorities for Synfig. It was decided to continue work on optimizing rendering speed for workarea. Another priority turned to be the Single-Window interface and we discussed the optimal strategy of its implementation.

Besides the main priorities we have took a chance to discuss implementation strategies for Bones, Raster Drawing Tools, Vector Drawing Tools and Frame-by-Frame Animation Support.

It was a lot of fun to meet you all guys there, and I’m proud to be a part of your community!

One of the frequent questions people ask me is about the results of our meeting with Nina Paley. In my opinion it’s a bit hard to talk about results, since  it usually takes time for such consequences to show up. But below is some brief attempt for analysis.

Nina got into complex situation. From one side there was a Synfig, from the other side – Tupi. And there also was Blender, which wasn’t represented at LGM and she don’t know anything about, except that it have very well established development. On the other  hand, she likes Flash so much and none of the mentioned tools are close to deliver the Flash experience she have.

Gustav Gonzalez (Tupi), Nina Paley and Konstantin Dmitriev (Synfig / Morevna Project).
Photo by Maria ‘tatica’ Leandro.

In such situation, there is a willing to do something to make a difference, then that probably implies supporting one of the projects. But the main question is: which one? Choosing which one project give support to is impossible without deep expertize, investigation and a lot of learning. And that requires time and resources. So I have to disappoint my readers expecting decisions to be taken now and sudden – nothing like that will take place at the moment.

At this moment, for Nina all the existing open-source projects look equally far from ideal and the worst thing is that she’s not that much into free software culture (yet?) to believe that it worths to put her efforts into it.

Another problem of the discussion was that none of the participating sides was able to offer a clear strategy of establishing collaboration.

So, before Nina really could do something, she have to answer many questions for herself:

• Which one project give support to?
• How to give support
• Does it worths to dig into this at all, or better just go with proprietary software?

Lots of questions, eh? For me, as being a part of Synfig, all the questions can be reformulated in much simpler one: “Why not Synfig?”

During the LGM days me and Nina had a few practical sessions for Synfig usage, giving it a “test-drive”. At the end, her main complains about Synfig were summarized as low response/performance speed and the complexity of the program (“too difficult to learn”). She admitted that found impossible to learn Synfig on her own, without direct (personal and in-place) developer/consultant assistance and the software speed is considered on top of all her other priorities.

Me and Nina Paley (photo by Carlos López González)

Giving a “test-drive” to Synfig (photo by Carlos López González)

Then why not give a hand to Synfig and help to get rid of the outlined issues? Let me be honest here: at the current status Synfig isn’t ready to receive a support nor from Nina Paley, nor anyone else. The situation is that Synfig doesn’t have a resource gap to put the money into, which will guarantee the result as feedback, clearly observed as benefit for the sponsor.

So it’s a good moment to think what are exact steps we (Synfig) can do to leverage the existing gaps. Here are a my thoughts:

1. We need to bring Synfig development from random/freetime contributions to the status of planned and regular process.  For the past years there are already a good substantial movements in that direction, but we need to push that even further. This is impossible without establishing full-time employment for major Synfig contributors. And I feel the situation  gets ready for that. I’m not sure when exactly would it happen, but I’m sure that will be a real “game changer”.

2. The critic about Synfig’s complexity couldn’t be ignored. Of course, that could be done by changing Synfig itself and that refers to my previous point about full-time employment. But there’s also another way. For the past years we have proofed Synfig as suitable for animation production in the state “as it already is”. We have developed a workflows and that become our “know-how”.  Now we need to deliver this knowledge, those workflows to the audience. At the moment it doesn’t go further than random tutorials and screencasts. I think we have to bring this content to the next level by following Krita & Blender steps – releasing training DVDs. My experience of doing workshops in St. Petersburg and Moscow shows that the explanation of basics of cutout animation workflow in Synfig could fit into 2-3 hours. As result of those workshops I have a methodics and proofed it as effective. So, I believe that might be a really good direction to put our efforts into.

So, that’s the introspection. What else can I say about LGM?

Of course there was a LOT of interesting workshops. Unfortunately many of them were overlapped in time and that forced me to make a hard choices. Personally, I would prefer workshops to take place in parallel with the talks instead of having several workshops at the same time.

Timothée Giet, David Revoy, Konstantin Dmitriev (photo by Carlos López González)

So I have missed the workshop by David Revoy, because we had Synfig meeting. For the same reason I missed the Krita Sketch workshop by Timothée Giet – I’ve dropped by at the “animation creation workflow sharing session” by Girin Studio. It was very interesting to see their approaches and I really admire of their work. Of course I couldn’t miss a chance to share our workflow – so it turned into a kind of another unplanned workshop for me.

Demonstrating MorevnaProject’s workflow (photo by Peter Westenberg)

Also at LGM I have discovered a modification of Pencil, which turns this software into stop-motion tool. Awesome idea! Unfortunately, they have used the official version of Pencil, not ours. So it might require some efforts if I would decide to merge their changes.

Working (photo by Ramon Miranda)

This year I was not much into attending talks, instead I was happy to have some coding/debugging sessions with Carlos. I’ve started to work on the Zoom Handle feature for Group layers and almost finished another feature that allows to set default interpolation for individual layer’s parameters. Also we have discussed some neat concepts about extending Synfig animation features. That was a lot of fun and also the great chance to expand the horizons!

Development notes

Well, I think that is. My report is already too long and it’s hard to fit all the awesome events happened. I was happy to meet  a lot of awesome people and although it was only a few days, I feel many of you as a close friends and always smiling when see your faces at the photos or videos.

At the end of my trip, when I met Alexandre Prokoudine in Moscow, he asked me what was the most important thing happened to me during the conference. I was unable to answer clearly. It was too early to answer. Now, after everything settled down in my head and first results are starting to reveal themselves, I can answer clearly: the most important thing in this trip was meeting Carlos López González and collaborating together. I think the consequences of that are hard to underestimate and more results are sure to follow.

 

P.S. You can read more LGM reports from an awesome people here:

• http://timotheegiet.com/blog/anim/back-from-the-future-tools-lgm-2013.html
• http://krita.org/item/144-libre-graphics-meeting-2013
• http://www.ramonmiranda.com/2013/04/lgm-madrid-2013-future-tools.html
• http://tatica.org/en/2013/04/17/lgm-2013/
• http://girinstud.io/news/2013/05/report-of-our-first-libre-graphics-meeting/

…and here are also links to LGM photos I found:

• Official LGM photostream
• Gallery by Tobias Ellinghaus
• Galleries by Peter Westenberg: (1) (2) (3) (4)
• Photos by David Revoy
• Gallery by Carlos López González
• Gallery by Tatica

You can download the full tutorial in ogg-theora format here: http://archive.org/details/SynfigCharacterTemplateTutorial

Enjoy!

Click here to download full package with both characters

The character is traced and rigged by Nikolay Mamashev.

License: CC-Zero 1.0

Enjoy!

As it was promised, today we’re releasing all files for our character template. That’s it – we’re publishing the basic charater for you to play with and reuse. Under the terms of CC-Zero 1.0 license, of course.

Click here to download the latest version

Also, there is a github repository for those who love to clone, fetch and fork. ^__^

To use the template you will need the latest versions of Synfig Studio and Papagayo, which we have updated as well. Please get them at the software page.

But there’s not all. During the last period we worked hard testing the template and end up with more than one character. So we decided to publish them all. That means instead of single sample character you will get a library of characters. Expect more characters to be added in just a few hours.

Workshop

Also, if you remember, today is the day of my workshop at LGM, where I will be explaining how to use this template. Everyone who is planning to participate in the workshop, please working files here.

Please don’t forget to install the latest versions of Synfig Studio and Papagayo (from the software page).

For the people who cannot attend the workshop, I’ll try to record the screencast, combine with the video and publish it online. That surely take some time, but let’s hope that will work out finally.

That’s it, stay tuned!