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ZeMarmot, Libre Movie made with Free Software

Animation film about a Marmot wandering the world, under CC BY-SA and fully made with Free Software.

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ZeMarmot, Libre Movie made with Free Software

ZeMarmot, Libre Movie made with Free Software

ZeMarmot, Libre Movie made with Free Software

ZeMarmot, Libre Movie made with Free Software

ZeMarmot, Libre Movie made with Free Software

Animation film about a Marmot wandering the world, under CC BY-SA and fully made with Free Software.

Animation film about a Marmot wandering the world, under CC BY-SA and fully made with Free Software.

Animation film about a Marmot wandering the world, under CC BY-SA and fully made with Free Software.

Animation film about a Marmot wandering the world, under CC BY-SA and fully made with Free Software.

Jehan Pagès
Jehan Pagès
Jehan Pagès
Jehan Pagès
1 Campaign |
Paris, France
€14,717 EUR by 364 backers
€13,875 EUR by 330 backers on Jul 1, 2015

Non-English speakers

Pour une description du projet en français, cliquez ici.

Per una descrizione in italiano del progetto, clicca qui.

한국어 페이지 보러가기

NEWS

2015-06-09

We reached initial funding and passed the storm! This funds a few minutes of animation and a bit of software development. Now let's get serious to have more than an experiment.
Let's prove to the world that Free Software can do wonders, that Libre Art is not just a crazy thought; and before all, let's do an enjoyable movie with a researched story, not just a few minute gag animation. Can we do this?

Our next target? 20 000 €! This will allow to draw nearly 10 minutes of animation and develop more Free Software awesomeness! Get Marmot at the top of the mountain!
This is the time to explode social networks with Marmots everywhere! Spread the word and contribute. This is only starting!

In Short

ZeMarmot is a project of 2D animation movie (digital cell-animation) about wandering and freedom, planned to be released under Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International/Art Libre licenses and fully made with creative Free Software (GIMP, Blender, Ardour…).

The Movie

ZeMarmot is a road trip movie, about a Marmot, who loves to sleep and eat, and decides to leave his comfy burrow to discover the world.


Synopsis

Marmot is a marmot as any others. He likes to sleep, eat, and sleep again. One day, an old migratory bird with an eyepatch as a pirate,  lands next to a rock where Marmot was sleeping and tells him of the wonders of the world.

Marmot decides to leave his home for the trip of his life. Who knows? Maybe he will find even better places to sleep on?!

He will meet animal species unknown to him until now, make friends, even enter a big human city for a short time. Then a stowaway rat will help Marmot board a plane, which will bring him even further than any other Alpine Marmot may have ever been…

From Iran flying carpets to Paradise pacific island, Marmot will wander through dozen of places. Will he ever go back? Will he even want it?

Letter of Intent

Marmot is a simple character, who likes to eat and sleep. But the world is big with so much wonders. So our little rodent will go for a trip of discovery. This is a call to travel and freedom. Isn't it necessary sometimes to stop and rest in our hyperactive and over-stressful lives? Just breath a little. Contemplate. This is what we want to give to the world.

Jehan (co-scenarist) wandered the world from 2009 to 2014, after quitting an openspace job in IT, on his motorbike from Paris to Japan, across Europe, Asia, then Oceania…

This is this spirit of travel, happy and easy that we want to give back. Travels, wanderings even, are not just tourism. These are not about being scared of "the others" either, or of foreign lands. They can be about freedom.

The Team


  • LILA is a non-profit promoting Libre Art and creative Free Software. "ZeMarmot" project is made under LILA's umbrella.

  • AMMD is a cooperative of Free Artists producing Libre Art with Free Software and OpenHardware with their own recording and mixing studio. ZeMarmot's soundtrack will be composed, played and recorded by AMMD.


    Do you think they are crazy? We do too, and we love them!
    Teaser music is by "Le Grand Corvidé et ses Cachottes" (one of the band of the AMMD collective) under license Free Art 1.3.

  • Aryeom is an animation film director, painter and animator, with a Fine Art degree from Sangmyung University (South Korea). Her first co-directed short animation, Grandma Ocean, got screened in a dozen festivals and won 2 prices. She is currently an artist in residence at LILA. She is also the artist of the Wilber & Co regular comics strips (CC by-sa) featured in GIMP Magazine.
    Aryeom did all the storyboard, animating, drawing, coloring, editing of the above teaser.
    See previous animation films by Aryeom by clicking here!

  • Jehan is a wanderer, former actor (especially movie dubbing for a dozen of years), GIMP developer (as well as Free Software, from Firefox to Blender. Click here for a non exhaustive, but still quite accurate list), GNOME foundation member… In GIMP, Jehan has more than a hundred of commits, and made happen Symmetry painting, action search, and other features or bug fixes, but also contributes to many other software.
    Jehan participated to scenario, storyboard and editing of the above teaser, as well as technical consulting, organizing and all the boring stuff that nobody wants to do yet have to be done!

  • Henri Hebeisen is a 3D graphic designer and a "Blender Foundation Certified Trainer". He will contribute in case of any need of 3D assisting 2D drawing, whether for lighting, complicated perspective…
    Henri did some dynamic lighting for the sun on the first cut of the above teaser.

  • Grégoire Coustenoble is a journalist and awesome at drinking beers. He is our communication guy.

  • Lionel Ngo is our fan n°1, and translated the website into Italian.

  • You. When you contribute to the project, you are part of it!

Goals

To sum-up: 9000 € is a bare minimum to do even a very short animation, so we need as much as possible to do the best movie possible. If we can't raise enough, we will continue to contribute code and design to Free Software and ZeMarmot story will be continued as a comic book instead. So we won't abandon you!

Help us make ZeMarmot happy by funding his journey!

How Funding will be Spent

  • People (animators, developers, musicians, etc.)
  • Material (computer, screens…).
  • Rental and common expenses.
  • Documentation (books, field trips…).
  • All what we don't think about now but is necessary for Zemarmot to happen!

Perks

All images below are early conceptual views and will likely be different from the end product. We only want to give an "idea" of what you would get.

  • A USB key, containing the whole movie in HD, subtitles, soundtracks and some of the main assets.
    Note 1: the movie will obviously be viewable and downloadable online for everyone. The USB key could still be a very nice present for you or your friends.
    Note 2: the full assets will be available as download, since there would be too much to be contained on a single USB key.

  • A set of 10 postcards in a luxury pocket, with high quality images from ZeMarmot movie, on UV coated paper. Perfect to send to friends or family!

  • A poster of the movie. No visuals yet, but be assured: it will be beautiful, and printed on good paper!
  • The "Free Software meets Libre Art" Mug! Below an early concept design of a full contour image with Wilber (from the GIMP project), GNU (from the Free Software Foundation) and Marmot.

  • A ZeMarmot t-shirt. We still haven't figured out the finale design. But below is a concept work-in-progress.

Libre Movie


ZeMarmot will be released as Creative Common Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International and Art Libre licenses.

It means you will be allowed — even encouraged ! — to watch it with your friends, your family whether it be just 2 people or 10000000! Yes, you can share it on any website, on p2p networks… No governmental warning telling you are an ugly thief, because you are not! When we say "Freedom", we mean it.

We are striving for a more human cinema industry, less hidden costs, more transparency. This means we need the money to make the movie happen, but when it is done, we give it to the world. After all, isn't it what "crowdfunding" should be about? Being funded by the world, and giving back the funded project? When an investor puts money into a project, one expect an investment feedback. What if yours was the common goods? What if your money paid more than just funny tee-shirts, but actually contributed to a better world: artworks not encumbered by copyrights, that you can share and see at will…

All this is why we make a Libre Movie.

So if you like our movie, or our philosophy, we'd be very happy if you could fund us!

The work involved and the files

ZeMarmot is a digital cell animation film. This is neither 3D (as you would do with a full Blender workflow), nor 2D vectorial (you would use Synfig or Tupi in Free Software). We draw nearly every image, frame by frame.

This is a lot of work: 24 images per second. So a minute of movie requires 24x60 = 1440 images just to get a single minute of movie! Some images can be reused, and you can comprise and draw 12 images per second. Yet that's still a lot of drawing, coloring, testing and editing! You get the idea.

And in case you don't, well we deliver the files involved in creating the 55 sec teaser which was created for this campaign! Check out the 8 GB of files: http://download.libreart.info/08.Teaser/ This will be our process for this movie. We won't only release the finale result, but also all the files involved for you to download, tweak, reuse, and we will also document how to. Hey if you wanted to make your own mix out of our files, of course you could, what the heck!

Free Software

I'm sure you have guessed the obvious: we are passionate about Free Software. The above teaser was fully made with Free Software: GIMP for drawing and coloring, Blender for editing and for some light effects, ardour for sound and music. Even our operating system is a Free Software (GNU/Linux)!


Jehan is a Free Software developer and is working on improving them as we will go forward with this project. There are a lot of very stable and extremely good software. But we don't know of any other 2D drawn animation film of substantial length which has ever been made with Free Software. And this makes the project much more difficult, but also much more exciting. As pioneers, we would be the first to encounter all the most annoying issues, but also the ones to fix or document them, and we are happy to do so.

There always need a first one, a serious project to field-test the software and make them rock-solid. We want to be this one, and hope you'll help us be!

Below are a few hints on our plans.

Improving Existing Software

  • GIMP: improvements and bug fixes, but also having the animation preview plugin to be able to line test animations, and preview much more complex animations, with high resolutions (HD), any complex layer and frame structure, and many advanced features.
  • Blender VSE: transform image sequences directly into the preview window (see our patch waiting for inclusion), work inside meta strips, import layered images (XCF or OpenRaster) and have the layers directly placed according to the animation layout… The latter will likely be our first development in Blender.
  • OpenRaster: extension for animation, allowing us to easily exchange files between programs, and keep animation layouts.

Creating New Software

We have already started working on a new higher level software enabling the organization of an animation film project. It will include storyboarding, x-sheets, and initial generation of OpenRaster files ready for drawing. The goal is to help organize a big and complex project involving hundreds, or even thousands, of files, and simplify repetitive base works, but also provide a higher level vision of a project to discover mistakes before even starting to draw.

Communication and Documenting

As we go, we will communicate, explain the issues we may have encountered and how we fix them, tell of the software we have tested, what we chose and why, and finally will document all what we do, especially if it is new, or if we developed it.

We will likely also release a book after the project about "Creating 2D animation with Free Software" (not a finale name!), which will also be under a Libre license (probably same: CC BY-SA).

Conclusion

Will you help us make this movie happen? I hope so!

If ever you were completely broke, and are just not able, we understand though. Know that you will still be able to watch the movie since it will be released for everyone. So do not hesitate to make noise about it, and spread the word! Share on social networks, your website, your blogs, news website, or with the Indiegogo sharing tool!

If you can't contribute, maybe your friends can. And then everybody will be happy, will get an awesome movie about travel and freedom, and Free Software will also get better.

Additional credits: apart for all other credits already cited, the song and short animation "Copying is not Theft" has been released by Nina Paley, in Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0.

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Choose your Perk

Marmot lover

€5 EUR
You get a big thank you from the whole team. There is no small support, so thank you from the bottom of our heart!
21 claimed

Credits

€10 EUR
You will get your name in the credits of the movie.
104 claimed

ZeMarmot movie poster

€35 EUR
The poster of the movie to put on your wall! Shipping included.
12 claimed

Movie in a beautiful USB card

€35 EUR
You will receive the movie in a beautiful USB key, in a slim "card" format, so that you can bring it in your wallet anywhere with you! These will be shipped first thing before official online release. Shipping included!
47 claimed

ZeMarmot postcards

€35 EUR
A nice set of 10 high quality postcards from ZeMarmot movie, with UV coating, presented in a nice portfolio paper pouch. Shipping included.
7 claimed

Free Software Mug

€35 EUR
An awesome mug featuring GNU, Wilber and Marmot, from an awesome design of Aryeom. All your friends at work will envy you! Shipping included.
47 claimed

ZeMarmot t-shirt

€35 EUR
A t-shirt of ZeMarmot movie. You will look awesome in parties. Shipping included.
18 claimed

Two movie items

€65 EUR
Choose 2 of the movie items: - The movie on USB; - ZeMarmot Postcards; - Free Software mug; - ZeMarmot T-shirt; - ZeMarmot poster. Shipping included.
23 claimed

3 Movie items

€90 EUR
Choose 3 of the movie items: - The movie on USB; - ZeMarmot Postcards; - Free Software mug; - ZeMarmot T-shirt; - ZeMarmot poster. Shipping included.
6 claimed

4 Movie Items

€110 EUR
Choose 4 of the movie items: - The movie on USB; - ZeMarmot Postcards; - Free Software mug; - ZeMarmot T-shirt; - ZeMarmot poster.
0 claimed

All Movie Items

€120 EUR
Get all the the movie items: - The movie on USB; - ZeMarmot Postcards; - Free Software mug; - ZeMarmot T-shirt; - ZeMarmot poster. Shipping included.
6 claimed

Silver Sponsor

€150 EUR
You get all the movie items and become "Silver Sponsor" of the movie, with your name written in a special section in the credits, and also on the website!
7 claimed

Signed poster

€170 EUR
You have all the perks of the Silver Sponsor, and your movie poster is also signed by both the director and scenarists (Aryeom & Jehan)
2 claimed

Signed, numbered digital print

€250 EUR
You have all the perks of the Silver Sponsor, and your movie poster signed, as well a printed digital drawing by Aryeom, on high quality thick paper. The drawing will be printed only once in a lifetime, at 100 copies maximum. Every print will be numbered and signed by Aryeom.
2 out of 100 of claimed

Gold Sponsor

€350 EUR
You will get all perks of the Silver Sponsor + the signed movie poster. And you will be cited in the credits in a special "Gold Sponsor" section, as well as on the website, with an optional logo or photograph that you can provide if desired.
1 claimed

Original A3 Drawing

€500 EUR
You will get all the perks of the gold sponsor, as well as an original drawing on high quality A3 paper by Aryeom.
1 out of 20 of claimed

Original drawing on request

€750 EUR
You will get all the perks of the gold sponsor, as well as an original drawing on high quality A3 paper by Aryeom. You can request a specific drawing or a topic though Aryeom keeps a veto vote.
0 out of 15 of claimed

Paint on canvas

€1,000 EUR
You will get all the perks of the gold sponsor, as well as a wonderful paint on canvas, on a good quality canvas material, about 30x30 cm size. The paint topic will be related to ZeMarmot. Each paint will be unique. Add 100 € for delivery out of France.
0 out of 5 of claimed
sold out

First Gold Sponsor

€350 EUR
1 out of 1 of claimed
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