Amazing Sentence

Recently, as of one of my jobs, I was involved in experiment about teaching open-source animation to kids. For me it was interesting to test the technologies we use in Morevna in the unusual environment. And now I’m happy to announce the first result – animated short of the younger group (9 -12 years old) entitled “Amazing Sentence”.

View/Download OggTheora video

As the project mentor I was responsible for screenplay, storyboarding, directing and teaching the technology and tools. Following the screenplay and storyboard, kids were drawing images and animated them frame-by frame in Pencil. Sometimes they used MyPaint to create background. After that their animation were composed in Synfig into scenes. All scenes were stitched together and mixed with audio in Blender. For music we have used the CC-licensed track of Juanitos band and the fragment of closing theme from Big Buck Bunny animated short by Blender Foundation (which is CC-licensed as well). All sound FX were retrieved from the freesound.org project. Considering that each participant dedicated 3 hours per week to the project, it took a 6 months for kids to create this work (including learning).

This turns to be the first animated short made on Remake build system.  It demonstrates how Morevna workflow can be applied to  create frame-by-frame animation. Here, in Morevna Project, we  use the same techniques when creating (2D) animatic. I hope that sources of this work will help people to learn and adapt that workflow to their needs.

EDIT: I’m looking for someone who can offer me webspace to upload the full sources of this animation. The sources will be released under the same free license (CC-BY). The size of the sources are around 300Mb (without rendering data). We have used the Remake, so anyone will be able to easily modify/rebuild whole animation from sources.

UPDATE: Sources are  available here now – amazing-sentence.zip (90 Mb).

Enjoy!

Full credits (in English):

Artwork & Animation by
Andrej Idubalin (9 y.o.)
Anastasia Majzhegisheva (12 y.o.)
Danil Maksimov (12 y.o.)
Aziz Murzaev (12 y.o.)
Vlad Rusmanov (9 y.o.)
Dima Popov (10 y.o.)

With the Voice Talents of
AnastasiaMajzhegisheva as Teacher
Vlad Rusmanov as Sasha
Olga Pak as Girl

Written and Storyboard by
Konstantin Dmitriev

Based on the story by
Viktor Goljavkin

Music
“Sai-k-delic Party” by Juanitos (retrieved from Jamendo)
Final Theme by Jan Morgenstern (retrieved from http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/)

Sound FX
retrieved from freesound.org project
by following contributors:
guitarguy1985, HerbertBoland, IFartInUrGeneralDirection, John_Sauter, krb21, reinsamba, Robinhood76, Pooleside

Editor
Konstantin Dmitriev

Software
Pencil, Synfig Studio, Blender, MyPaint, Remake

Directed by
Konstantin Dmitriev