Today is 30th of May and it’s a birthday of Morevna Project. Hard to believe – it’s been exactly 9 years, since morevnaproject.org got online and I published a first post on this blog.
It is really fun to remember how it all began, awesome to see how far it got and absolutely exciting to know that it is just a beginning.
I would like to take this chance to look back and remember the most significant events of the past years.
2010 April 26 – Morevna Project Production Cuts published.
2011 June 19 – “Amazing Sentence” released – the first animated short made by children as part of Morevna Project. In the credits you can see name of Anastasia Majzhegisheva as artwork and voice talent.
2012 March 01 – Our first crowdfunding campaign. The goal is to collect funds for producing keyframes artwork for Morevna Demo. The keyframes are painted by Nikolai Mamashev.
https://morevnaproject.org/donations/
2012 May 2-5 – First participation in Libre Graphics Meeting with a talk about RenderChan (it was called Remake back then).
2012 November 10 – Morevna Demo released.
2013 April 10-13 – Second participation in Libre Graphics Meeting with a workshop about Synfig. My trip was kindly sponsored by the community via Indiegogo campaign.
2013 May 24 – Morevna Project receives Shuttleworth Flash Grant. Funds used to hire developer Ivan Mahonin to work on Synfig and produce Synfig Video Training Course.
2013 September – Our first crouwdfunding campaign to fund development of Synfig.
2013 November 18 – Synfig Training Course released. The course production is funded from Shuttleworth Flash Grant.
2014 November – Julia Velkova visits Morevna Project to gather on-field material for her research on open-source animation film production.
Two weeks in Siberia with Morevna Project, open-source animation tools and anime
2015 April 28 – Synfig 1.0 released, summarizing results of our crowdfunding campaigns for Synfig development in 2013-2014.
2015 July 2 – “In the heart” – first animated short by Anastasia Majzhegisheva released.
2015 November 25 – Our Russian crowdfunding campaign for quality Russian voicing of Morevna Episode 3.
2016 August 2 – Morevna Episode 3 released. Anastasia Majzhegisheva participates as lead artist.
2017, January 10 – Synfig 1.2. released, with the features developed as part of our work on Morevna Episode 3. The rendering engine is completely rewritten, thanks to supporters of our crowdfunding campaign of 2015-2016.
2016 September 20 – Nikolai Mamashev crowdfunds his effort to produce Pepper & Carrot Motion Comic, based on the web-comic by David Revoy. The production takes place under the label of Morevna Project.
Whoa, that was a long path! What’s next? Right now the Pepper & Carrot Motion Comics makes its final steps for release and also Morevna Episode 4 is hot in production. Get ready for more news soon! I would like to say “Thank you!” to all people who supported our efforts during all those years – you are awesome! And yes – Happy Birthday, Morevna Project!
4 Responses
Happy Birthday, and thank you for the great resource! I only recently learned of your collective efforts here and Konstantin’s contributions to Synfig and OpenToonz.
I am still trying to figure out which software is best for beginners. Do you have any recommendations?
Thank you for the kind words!
Regarding the best choice, that depends on the type of your animation and your platform. If you want to animate by morphing shapes, then choose Synfig. For frame-by-frame animation choose OpenToonz. For cutout bones animation I would also recommend OpenToonz. But if your platform is OSX, then it is better to choose Synfig, since OSX version of OpenToonz is freaky unstable.
Thanks, Konstantin!