This will be the WIP thread for a short project I’m starting today and hoping to finish by September 15th. I plan to animate a song called “Candice Stone.” I wrote the song a few years back and recorded it as part of an act known as Bailey Jester. You can hear a clip from the song if your interested at Bailey Jester’s CD Baby page:
cdbaby.com/cd/baileyjester2 (Candice Stone is clip #6 in the left column on the page.)
I’ll be using all open source software for this project including:
Synfig
Pencil
Inkscape
Gimp
Audacity
Cinelerra
Ubuntu (operating system)
(I’ll update the software list as I work on the project so that all software used will ultimately be listed.)
My hope is to push both my own amateur animation skills as well as the limits of the software I use. In this thread I’ll both document my progress and seek out feedback.
The project will essentially animate the story contained in the song and will wind up being a bit under 4 minutes long. Right now I’m doing a first run at thumb nailing a very basic story board. Overall, I’m going for a sort of Washington Irving feel, something both lyrical and creepy, yet readily accessible to the general viewer.
Anyway, this post marks the beginning and I hope you’ll stop by occasionally to cheer me on and - if need be - hold my feet to the fire. 
Thanks,
Matt
Sounds interesting, and difficult, so I’ll be here to cheer you on and look at your work.
Are you going to do this all by yourself or will you get any help?
This sounds cool. Good luck with it!
Thanks for the good wishes! And @ Devilly: I’ll be doing this by myself (unless you count all the help I’ll be getting from all of the great people who helped code all of the software I’ll use).
Matt
STORY BOARDS AND CHARACTER DESIGN
Every spare minute this weekend has been spent either thumb nailing a basic story board or playing with character designs. I scanned one page of my story board thumb nail work as representative. I’m doing this on newsprint with pencils, but I went over most of this one with a ball point pen so it would scan a little better:
Since I’m the only one working on this, I just get enough down so that I know what’s happening, so you may not be able to quite discern the story from these images. Also, the art here isn’t great, but again it’s just so that I have a sort of visual script. You can see that I just cross out stuff and keep going, all the while making notes about what’s going on. I’m not sure if I’ll just work from the marked up thumb nails like these or go back and do a more finished story board and work from that. It’ll save time if I can work from these, of course, but I’ll just have to see how it goes.
I hope to have all of this stage completed by nightfall tomorrow (Monday).
Matt
I like the revised viewpoint for the first two frames - closer to the candle’s viewpoint - more ominous…
Chris
