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”.
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. I hope that sources of this work will help people to learn and adapt that workflow to their needs, that’s why I’m looking for someone who can offer me webspace to upload the full sources of this animation. The sources released under the same free license (CC-BY). We have used the Remake, so anyone will be able to easily modify/rebuild whole animation from sources.
How to build:
- Install required software
- Remake >= 0.3
Homepage: github.com/morevnaproject/remake/
Download: github.com/morevnaproject/remake/tarball/master - Synfig Studio >= 0.63.00
Homepage: synfig.org/
Download: synfig.org/cms/en/download/ - Pencil 0.5 (Morevna Branch)
Homepage: github.com/morevnaproject/pencil/
Download: morevnaproject.org/packages/#pencil - Blender 2.49b (with FFMpeg support)
Homepage: blender.org/
Download: morevnaproject.org/packages/#blender
- Download sources and unpack
- Cd into unpacked dir and run
$ remake ./project-sentence.blend- After process will be finished grab the project-sentence.blend.mpg file from the render/ subdirectory
Enjoy!
Full credits (in English):
Artwork & Animation by
Andrej Idubalin (9 y.o.)
Nastja 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
Nastja Majzhegisheva 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 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
