f r e e f a c

Sparkde is a an animation studio located in Rome that is switching to an open source production pipeline. As part of this effort, I am joining them to help rig and animate an upcoming project in blender. I’ve been busy rigging this past week and a half,  and will be in the studio for the next 4-5 weeks for the animation. The project is for CNIPA (Center for infotech in Public Administration), and it will be made as I said with blender for 3D ( Fedora Linux as the operating system for the studio).

I’m thrilled to go work on the movie and meet the team, including Enrico Valenza (EnV) who worked on Elephants Dream and on Big Buck Bunny. I hope this starts open source filmmaking movement in Italy - after all, Rome, Open City sparked the Italian Neorealism movement ;)

Thanks to the efforts of blender users Jedihi and Drip Stone (and no thanks to my slow proofreading self) a MancandyFAQ translation effort is underway; the first goal is to produce timed english subtitles transcribed from the videos, which can then be translated into many languages (I believe the first two will be Spanish and Chinese). Here is the thread on blenderartists, and here is the wiki (in Chinese). Thanks guys, I promise to do a little proofreading every night.

EDIT: forgot to put the URL for the english language wiki on blender.org. Maybe more transcribers / translators would like to join the effort. I’m really thrilled at this, both as a practical example of the benefits of open content, and because one of my regrets about the original DVD was that it was english only.