How-To/Info/Sources
Animation
2D/Traditional Animation
Pencil is "an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. Pencil is free and open source." This programme is easy to use and ideal for beginners or young people. Professionals may find it useful for creating animatics. See also the User Manual. (www.les-stooges.org)
Synfig "Two-dimensional animation has long been the domain of proprietary software. That changes with the introduction of Synfig, a free software/open source tool for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources." (www.synfig.org)
KToon is "a 2D Animation Toolkit designed by animators (Toonka Films) for animators, focused to the Cartoon Industry. This project is covered by the GPL License using G++, OpenGL and QT as programming resources from KDevelop as the development platform. By now, KToon is only available for Unix systems but we expect to make it works on Windows systems too someday." (ktoon.toonka.com)
Computer Generated/Code Based Animation
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. (...) Available for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows." See also the Learning resources. Worth noting is also the list of Related Initiatives on the main Processing page, though not all projects listed there are open-source ones. (www.processing.org)
Pure Data "PD (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. (...) Pd is free software and can be downloaded either as an OS-specific package, source package, or directly from CVS." See also the Pure Documentation. (puredata.info)
The following free and open-source projects (previously linked in this guide) might also be of interest to animators:
Inkscape (vector graphics editor, www.inkscape.org), GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program, www.gimp.org) and The CinePaint Project (deep paint image retouching tool, www.cinepaint.org).
Animation related and project development:
Arduino is "an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. (...) The microcontroller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing)." (www.arduino.cc)
celtx is a free and open source package for "media pre-production" (screenplay, storyboard, schedule and more). Celtx is of course also meant for traditional, live action film productions. (celtx.com)
3D Modelling/Animation
Wings 3D is free and open-source "subdivision modeler". It is fairly easy to use (as far as this can be said about any 3D app) and might be of special interest to those starting with 3D modelling. See also the linked User Manual.
MakeHuman is "completely free, innovative and professional software for the modelling of 3-Dimensional characters." While not quite feature complete yet (currently 0.9.1 RC1) MakeHuman features an extremely elegant, intuitive and forward-looking interface that could well establish a new standard in terms of user/software interaction. (www.makehuman.org)
For completion's sake the previously linked free and open-source blender needs to be mentioned in this 3D/Animation specific update. Blender is a high-end, state of the art modelling, animation, rendering and video post tool - just to mention a few of its many features. See also the extensive online Manual.
Animation/Open Movies
Big Buck Bunny (formerly known as the "Peach open movie project") is a blender made 3D short produced by the Blender Foundation and was released online for free in May 2008. One of the most interesting aspects of this project is the fact that all production ".blend" files can also be downloaded, modified, shared etc. under a Creative Commons 3.0 licence. This practise is virtually non-existent in the commercial 3D animation world, for all sorts of (legal) reasons. By sharing the production files with the blender community (and by previously documenting the production process on the blog) Peach/Big Buck Bunny can safely be regarded as an "open movie", even though neither script nor the actual production was "community made" as such, instead there was an application process that allowed anyone interested to be selected for the actual Peach team. While the finished product is of a very high standard and can easily compete with comparable shorts from Hollywood animation studios in terms of its technical quality, the subject matter/theme (revenge) and the way violence is shown might come across as disturbing to some viewers since scenes reminiscent of torture are portrayed in a somehow peculiar easy-going/matter-of-fact kind of mixture. (www.bigbuckbunny.org)
Blendpolis Movie Project is "a community project with the ambition to produce an open movie. We, the members, share the passion of creating 3D art in Blender." (blendpolis-movie.de)
Detail Library is "the first open movie project of a small group of artists, teachers and students (the members of this blog), reunited just for the production of it." (detaillibrary.blogspot.com)
Animation/Game Development
Apricot is an open 3D game project, the Blender Foundation's latest effort after Big Buck Bunny (featuring the already established characters from the movie) aimed at advancing and promoting blender's capabilities for game development. Even though blender has its own built-in Game Engine (GE), Apricot uses the free and open-source Cristal Space (www.crystalspace3d.org), a "cross-platform software development kit for realtime 3D graphics, with particular focus on games". (apricot.blender.org)
Video
Education:
Video/Movie Editing and Video Captioning are two resource pages from "Shambles in S.E.Asia (The Education Project Asia)" aimed at teachers and educators. (www.shambles.net)
FX/VJ:
FreeFrame is "an open-source cross-platform real-time video effects plugin system". It supports a wide range of commercial programmes (e.g. After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Jitter, VVVV or Modul8) as well as open-source ones (e.g. FFRend or PureData). (freeframe.sourceforge.net)
Film Making/Remix Culture/Open Media:
MOD Films - remixable films and tools for film reuse "MOD Films makes re-mixable films and tools for film re-use. Sustainable Story Systems." (modfilms.com)
G8 TV Wiki "At the G8 protests 2007 in Heiligendamm, Germany and surrounding events we ran G8-TV to create an alternative news platform for video content. We decided to document how we did it, so you can set up your own Internet TV station and be the media!" (wiki.g8tv.org)
Community Platforms:
Cedar River's Native Tube "invites all of indian country to post your Native sounds with us. We would like the brothers and sisters to know that we will promot your music at no cost to you. The Cedar River first Nations Community is a non profit organization." Note that while the project's host (magnify.net) Terms of Use agreement is a pretty standard commercial one, it does however say that "The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the Magnify Website." This is important, not all (popular) video sharing sites let users do that - always check a site's Terms of Use agreement before uploading any work! (nativetube.magnify.net)
Research/Copyright:
YouTomb is "a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation." (youtomb.mit.edu)
Open-Source Development:
Lumiera "a Free/Open Source Non-Linear Editing (NLE) application project for Linux developed by the CinelerraCV community. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but it is now an independent project with its own name. Lumiera is still in an early stage of development. It is not usable yet." (lumiera.org)
Related Video blog:
GVFX - Gnu Video FX is "a project for creating TEMPLATES of 3D transitions, filters, etc." using free and open-source software.
Related Video article:
Video Editing with Blender looks at the open-source blender built-in VSE (Video Sequence Editor) from a user's point of view - note that some points made in the article refer to how things were before the blender 2.46 update in May 2008 (eugenia.gnomefiles.org, 20.04.08) - this article was also discussed on Slashdot. (tech.slashdot.org, 21.04.08)
Audio/Music
Free-To-Use (Sheet) Music:
International Music Score Library Project "IMSLP attempts to create a virtual library containing all public domain musical scores, as well as scores from composers who are willing to share their music with the world without charge. You can read the full list of goals that IMSLP will try to achieve." (imslp.org)
Musopen "We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free." (musopen.com)
Indie Music/Labels:
Free Albums Galore "I post only legally free albums, instead of blindly hoping copyright owners won’t mind me distributing their music." (freealbums.blogsome.com)
RIAA Radar is "a tool that music consumers can use to easily and instantly distinguish whether an album was released by a member of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)." (Reason: for supporting indie labels instead.) (www.riaaradar.com)
MAFIAA™ An April 1 (2006) joke site pretending to be the MAFIAA, short for Music And Film Industry Association of America™. The site and its acronym gained cult status among geeks and reflects how a whole (new) generation of music and film lovers - and buyers - feels about the established, mainstream (American) film and music industry and its current representatives whose business model to many seems to be primarily based on cheating and suing their (former) fans and customers. (mafiaa.org)
Amie Street "was founded by three college friends in 2006 with one goal: make it affordable, fun and easy to discover and download new music. (...) We support our artists by giving them 70% of song sales and never taking ownership of their creative work." (amiestreet.com)
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