I’m chuffed to announce the beginning of fateh’s traditional ‘Birthweek’ celebrations.. There will festivities, merriments, sweetmeats and the traditional “defenestration of the salmon” in honor of the glorious occasion. It is said that on the day of her birth, miracles happened: the blind became sighted, new stars appeared in the heavens and processed cheese turned to the finest cheddar.
So happy birthday, and thanks for saving the story (among other things)

The Connecticut Film Festival is taking place in Danbury Connecticut on June 2-7. I’ll be in the Interactive Festival (part of the CTFF) making a small workshop focused on movie production using Free and Open Source software”Making 3-D Movies Using Free Software”, on June 5th at 5:40pm, and doing a panel “The ABC’s of CGI” the following day at 4:00pm. Another of our team, Jason Van Gumster (author of Blender for Dummies) is going to be on the panel as well, and is going to give a talk at 4:00pm on June 5th entitled “Completely Free Animation using Blender”.
If you’re in the area, come check it out! I’m sure there will be room for beer (or soda) and pretzels after.

Soon (6-9 may) is the time for LGM (Libre Graphics Meeting) – in Montreal this year. LGM is a groovy arto-codo-free-softwariconference, where you get to chat and hear people present about Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Krita, GEGL, Hugin and more – many of the programs that we depend on to make tube.

At least two Tube project team-members will be there- Martin Poirier is presenting about Blender 2.5 (he’s one of those mythical ‘coder’ people), and it looks like I’ll be presenting “Short Tube, Free Pipeline” and about “Video Editing using Blender with Real-World Examples” (at least, my proposals both show up on the tentative schedule.) In addition, there is some possiblity that other team-members might show up (Jean-Sebastian isn’t far away, and Jason and Kursad have both threatened they *might* show up,) giving us the opportunity to organize a late night blend and hack session or two for the project. If you’re in the area, come see us, maybe we’ll force you to work

(If you’re not reading on planetblender or graphicsplanet, you can safely ignore this post.)

Welcome to the tube feed* ! This is the production log for an animated movie project tube, made in Blender and other free software. We’ll be sharing experiences and information, pictures and previews about making (animated) films with free software. I highly recommend you read our introductory post, and check out the about/team and media pages, for some more background on the project.

* The internet is made out of that stuff, dontcha know?

…our new animation film project, tube:

A while ago in Buenos Aires on the Plumiferos film, I was slowly doodling a little image in my spare time. I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, except I had no intention of animating it. Of course, everyone I showed it to said “you should animate that! really! it’ll be the best thing for you!”


Back home, over late night coffee with fateh, we debated a possible animation based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I had just read, and was (and still am) fascinated by it. Somehow the subway image became part of the story. A few scribbles, doodles and arguments later we had the outline of a 5 minute script that was to become tube. [Observe: Not a feature!]

Later, Jason of Handturkey studios contacted me. Being insane, he’d signed up to do an animation for the 48 hour film project, and was desperately seeking victimolunteers to help. I’d just finished a job, so I flew to Richmond, and spent a shivering, sleepless and splendid weekend in Jason’s cramped apartement, packed in with coffee-swilling blenderheads, with more working over the internet. (Jason gave a presentation about it at the blender conference)

After the project ended, we were all still on the mailinglist and IRC channel, happy to have survived, and naturally, looking for novel ways to get in trouble. I remembered the script I had knocking around on my harddrive, and asked the folks if they would like to do something with it. To my surprise, they said yes, and voila! tube had a production team.

We’ve come a long way since then, so the blog will be doing catchup to get everyone up to speed. For now check the site menu, there’s a bit of information in the about/team/media links above.


Oh yes, we also made this silly teaser: