The Synfig team really needs to clean up videos and edit them before publishing them. I think it’s really important to give Synfig a more polished and professional look as this attracts more interest to its development. I’m willing to help with video editing, if you guys are interested.
I already cleaned up one of the videos to give an example. Here is the edited version of the bones video. Notice that I removed noise, edited out the pauses and ‘uuuuhhhs’ and added a lot of polish. The background music is royalty free, so no worries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-WciprpD8E&feature=youtu.be
download link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwzk-fAhFYDzamdsT1RBZHlOSEE/view?usp=sharing
Once Synfig has OpenGL integration and gets a little more cleaned up, I’m planning to make a big promo for it similar to these:
Elementary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYrobaenFCc
Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFE4rkSaKOY
I’m also curious if you guys are ever planning on launching another kickstarter effort? I looked at the old kickstarter page and I noticed a few reasons as to why it didn’t generate as much buzz as it could have:
#1: No video pitch! (very bad!)
#2: No goals listed for specific improvements (people want a feature lists)
#3: Not ambitious enough to ignite interest (They say ‘go big or go home’. Synfig needs to be more ambitious in its plans and ask for more money)
Okay, look at Synfig’s kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-app-lets-make-it-faster-than-phot/description
Now look at Krita: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-free-paint-app-lets-make-it-faster-than-phot/comments
You could argue that Krita is more popular, but the point is that Krita is successful because they have a very streamlined plan with concrete goals. Not only that, but the Krita team are extremely ambitious in that they directly call out Photoshop and claim that they can out-perform them. This kind of language generates interest and gets people excited for the project.
I think the Synfig team should seriously start discussing another kickstarter effort. This time, establish goals from the beginning and make those features known. Then add more features as stretch goals. I’m willing to help you guys any way that I can. I can edit your video pitch, write up and format the pitch documents and spread the word everywhere I can.
If you guys pitched this program right and you showed synfig with a beautiful interface, you can sell the idea of what Synfig ‘could be’ which will generate a lot of donations.