I’ve seen that Synfig has a YouTube channel which looks quite dormant for some time now. I just want to suggest that to make the channel active or more alive Synfig could post compilation of works made with Synfig and best work of the year and much more. Other softwares do this and it keeps the channel alive and running. News about new releases and features can also be added.
What do you think
https://youtube.com/@synfig
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Hallo @ekopimo you are absolutely right, for a very long time this has been my observation, infact I also have a SUGGESTION, I thought about Synfig having it’s own “11secondclub” club, where every month,an audio is put out and general community can make an animation of 11 seconds EXCLUSIVELY WITH SYNFIG on the last day of the month members could vote and all animations submitted that month ranked. To make things spicy, winning member could be awarded a badge, as well as other participating members, Also assets of the different animations could be made free, for members to explore/play around with. (please checkout on the 11secondclub see how it works, ours could be exclusively synfig)
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I wish the managers of the channel can look into the situation and reason our suggestions. I’ll love to see the Synfig YouTube channel up and running showcasing what has been made with Synfig 
It’s a good idea indeed, but I don’t know if we would get enough material to provide a short showreel every month as you suggested 
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Maybe a category in this forum can be created exclusively for that. And maybe it doesn’t need to be monthly. It can be created when there is enough works for it.
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Show Reel could be done from videos published in Artwork but as @rodolforg said there is a lack of material.
Every month is clearly too frequent, there are not enough new releases nor even features.
But everytime a new (obvious) feature is added to dev version, it could be a good idea to have a mini show reel from different artists exploiting it 
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The “Artwork” category does that.
As everybody mentioned, the community is small.
But what I believe is we need a leader who can guide and motivate the whole community to be engaging and more active than it is currently. This definitely requires them to put their time and effort, and not everyone is altruistic, or have enough time for it.
A Show Reel discussion was ignited but fizzled out…
Well, we can try…
Let’s vote a theme and the rules lol
Theme for the short animations
- Rectangle layer
- End of summer
- End of winter (south hemisphere )
- Synfig logo
- Animated photos
- Family
- Parrots
- Missing peanuts
- Text display
- Handcraft
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voters
Animation length
- 6 seconds
- 8 seconds
- 10 seconds
- 11?
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voters
Aspect ratio
- 4:3
- 16:9
- 9:16
- 13:6
- 6:13
- 11:8
- 8:11
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voters
Would it be something like that?
Hmm… quite an interesting theme xD.
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Ping.
Please vote
I gotta say, themes just aren’t very interesting nor informative…
I mean, parrots, really? What kind of theme is that? Well, at least it’s not pigeons (I don’t like pigeons).
It would be nice if themes were specific and had a short description so people actually know what is required of them. I see something like this:
- Motion graphic → animated logo. Take your favorite logo and make it appear in a fun way, like when a game console boots up
- Motion graphic → text. Take any word/phrase, like “Synfig” and make it appear through use of various effects (blurs, distortions, gradients, etc.)
- Animation → head turn. Your OC turning head
- Animation → emotions. Make your character wink
- Math → Dynamic converter. Draw a flower and make it swing using “Dynamic” converter simulating wind
Those options are a just an example, something from the top of my head.
I suggest having multiple choices in a challenge, so artists who don’t like one option had something else to work on. After a couple of challenges perhaps we would have something to put in a gallery/use in a show reel.
Personally, I think the length of animation is not important as well as aspect ratio.
We just want people to start using Synfig, so let’s not burden them with unneeded limitations. Each challenge is active for, let’s say, quarter of the year.
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They are called challenge 
, the challenge here is to convert these theme keywords to animations, by using your creativity.
Anyways, I like your themes because your suggested themes can be a learning opportunity too, and maybe after completion of them, we can create a tutorial to go in the documentation.
I think aspect ratio is important, because we need to put all of them together for the Show Reel.
We can make it easy by providing a starting template for animators, which would have theme name, aspect ratio, branding of Synfig. Similar to MondaysChallenge (they provide AE file template)
Parkinson’s Law, the amount of work expands to fill the time available.
It was just a proposal. I didn’t want to make something so technical nor specific.
Just like mine Themes - not features or techniques - to base on.
Yes. Otherwise the show reel could be… monotonous / repetitive.
Indeed, it isn’t. Just a base time to not last that long, but to people know it can be short too.
We failed to get some challenges recently. See Khemardi challenge or my call for promotion of 1.4.0 launch. But I don’t give up
Oh, right… I knew that.
Template can be a good thing, but again, I don’t like limiting people. It seems that it’s more important for us to get something to put in a demo/show reel rather than for people to have fun with the program. Let’s be honest, a work worth of putting in a demo reel isn’t coming from some simple no-one-voted-on-a-period challenge.
Yeah, but we gotta be a bit specific. For example, “Rectangle layer” theme doesn’t give people a lot to work with without some explanation. Anyway, sorry if my response seemed rude, I was just trolling you a little.
Aren’t you all a bit ambitious? I mean, I would understand if Synfig community had some real talents who could showcase something awesome in a span of 11 seconds but community is tiny, there’s like 3 and a half good animators here. I am not sure it’s very likely we’re getting something worth of show reel in these challenges…
Yeah, I saw that challenge. Those bouncing balls and waving flour sacks were magnificent! But how much people participated there? I counted 4 people.
Look, what I am saying is, let’s start small. We need to get people to just do something with Synfig, no need to set big goals. I say make some challenges, provide simple rewards, like winner would receive a badge “Winner of 2023 challenge” or, I don’t know, their work pinned in “Animation” category for 3 months or something. Hopefully, it will push people to use program for something big in the future that we will be able to put in a demo/show reel one day.
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Well, back to the (poor) parrots random proposal: one could make a motion graphics with the world itself, animate the head turn, do a lipsync, etc.
So could we have some creativity with rectangle layer. Rectangle deformations, an expressive rectangle-shaped character, a skeleton layer controlling a skeleton made of rectangles, an animation of Piet Mondrian art, etc.
No, just a fool
The example themes? Because I didn’t proposed challenges. My initial intention once ago on my call for promotion of 1.4.0 launch was more specific: showcase of new features or even fixes of 1.4.0. No answers
That was exactly my point. Sadly, we failed. But, after @ekopimo suggestion, I thought we could make a call via Synfig YouTube channel. It has almost 20,000 subscribers. Maybe a new video post after so many months could drag attention of some of our few users that do not follow the forums.
Anyway, all of my original post was a proposal of proposals. If you, with your amazing skills on Synfig, does not like it, …
Regarding your theme suggestions:
Well, “Synfig logo” is, for now, the most voted theme.
These were in the challenge list Khemardi shared.
Good to test if the converter (still?) works as intended 
And to promote it.
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Wow, that guy sure did like rectangles… That’s what I am talking about, don’t just provide a keyword, give some examples for a starting point.
Don’t you go there. You saw my animations, I didn’t even use “squash and stretch” in any of them, the most basic animation technique. So I may know me some Synfig, but I still suck as animator. Your proposals were fine, I just pointed out that it would be good to give some explanation along the keyword.
I think we can draw some conclusion. What can we do? We can definitely organize a challenge here on the forum. We have some themes, you provided some, I provided some, 8 people voted, so 8 potential submissions for the challenge which isn’t much. We can even make some themes of the challenge a call to promote an “X feature” introduced in 1.4.4/development build.
Theoretically, we can bring more people from YouTube channel, but remember that from those 19K subscribers only a handful active. I believe Konstantin (morevnaproject) maintains the channel, so if you believe in your idea, ask him if he can promote a challenge if someone organizes it here on the forum.
Maybe just a playlist on the Synfig channel of videos from other channels that were created with Synfig would work. I think Synfig’s popularity would grow more quickly if new animators were aware of how powerful it is. I tried several other programs before I finally found Synfig, and I’ve stuck with it because it’s just amazing. If the Synfig channel had something like a curated playlist, I’d post about it on my YT channel’s community thread.
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I think this would be better than a show reel. Just showcasing the works of others made with Synfig and categorizing them according to style or just something… In playlists.
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