Non-English speakers
Pour une description du projet en français, cliquez ici.
Per una descrizione in italiano del progetto, clicca qui.
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NEWS
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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.
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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.
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Marmot decides to leave his home for the trip of his life. Who knows? Maybe he will find even better places to sleep on?!
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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?
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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…
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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
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LILA is a non-profit promoting Libre Art and creative Free Software. "ZeMarmot" project is made under LILA's umbrella.
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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
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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!
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- 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.
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- A ZeMarmot t-shirt. We still haven't figured out the finale design. But below is a concept work-in-progress.
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Libre Movie
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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)!
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
