Here’s an update on this for you guys. The Firefox Flicks contest finished at the end of last month. No, we didn’t win. However, the pieces that did win were pretty good (of those, my personal favorite is the one called “This is hot”), so we don’t feel all that bad about it.

But! This plog is about our work, and our submission finally got posted on the Firefox Flicks website last night/this morning. So far, it’s had a pretty good showing (4 out of 5 stars), but of course, that’s with but a mere 30-some votes, but we’re pretty sure folks like it. It’s too bad they turned off commenting on the site. I’d be interested to hear what that many people think of the finished spot.

At any rate, all of this makes us very happy. And as a sign of that happiness, we’re gonna give another present out. Here’s the blend file for the tag on that spot. From it you can see the goofy rig I set up to control the fox’s movement as well as the vertex-painted textures and a couple alternate lighting setups that were ultimately rejected by my fellow Turkeys. Also, you see how I had to use a camera with a maxed-out lens size to approximate the look of the orthographic camera.

We’re releasing this file under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. All that means is that we would like you to indicate that we created the models and animation in that file. Using our studio name (Hand Turkey Studios) and main web address (www.handturkeystudios.com) would cover that just fine. We’d love to see what you do with this file, so drop us a line via email or posting here if you do.

Oh, and a point of note, this animation was created in the cvs version of blender, so you may want to download a testing build from blender.org. The file will still open in Blender 2.41, but you’ll miss out on some of the cool features, like the vector blur that was used.

And of course, the NTSC-resolution file of the finished animation is still available to anyone who’s interested in getting it. Just send us an email at firefoxlogo {at} handturkeystudios(.)com and we’ll hook you up.

That’s it! Enjoy!

We’ve completed our Firefox Flicks Ad Contest submission! For those of you following the work-in-progress posts, Modeling a Firefox and Animating a Firefox, you can finally see the finished product. If you read our Guest Post in the Firefox Flicks Backstage Blog, then you’ve got a little background about the concept for this spot. Basically, we’re running with the tagline, “Some things just make sense” and using a mix of our strengths: illustration, animation, and our unique (maybe bizarre would be a better word?) sense of humor.

At any rate, we’re pretty proud of the completed piece and those of you following it here on sheep-dot are going to get a special sneak-peek here before it gets posted to the Firefox Flicks site. Woohoo!

Alright… enough yammering. I present to you, Firefox: Some Things Just Make Sense.

Tools for creation: Blender, Cinelerra, The GIMP, ReZound, Adobe Photoshop, Pencils, and Ink.

Let us know what you think!

Happy Thanksgiving (or, at least, After-Thanksgiving)! To celebrate, here’s a little 30-second short that the studio did, called, Son of the Muffin Project: Low Resolution (3.2MB) and High Resolution (9MB). They’re in Quicktime format, so you might have to go install Quicktime if you haven’t already.

If you’re interested in a little backstory, the orginal Muffin Project was started almost 2 years ago on the blender community site, elysiun.com (soon to be blenderartists.org) in this topic. The project, as it was, stagnated and the folks involved went their separate ways. Since I’d done the original (admittedly quick) storyboard for the project, and since the concept is still funny, we decided to finish it ourselves.

Here’s an idea I’ve been bouncing around in my head for a month or so. I’m a frequent user of the open source video editor, Cinelerra (the Official Version and the Community Version). Working on the same project on multiple machines has always been kind of a pain (sometimes I like to pack things on my notebook and edit at a cafe or diner for a change of scenery). The problem I always have is that simply copying Cinelerra’s XML project file doesn’t do much to help me keep editing, since the source material is merely linked to in the file. Then it hit me.

Print layout programs like InDesign and Quark are similar to video editors in that they maintain links to source files… often only importing a low resolution version for working on the file. However, they also have an option to package a project. That is, the app will chase down the links to all the source material on your hard drive, copy it to a separate directory and save it with a new, properly re-linked project file. Why couldn’t the same thing be done in (or at least with) Cinelerra?

It could be done with a bash (or python or perl) script. Parse the XML file, hunting down source movies and graphics to copy them to a chosen directory, then fix the links to the new files and save a new XML file there as well. Options could be added to automagically create a tarball (gzip or bzip2, based on your preference) for backup, or re-encode the packaged video to a low-resolution proxy for offline editing (helpful as HD takes more hold), or remove the original source material after copying (quick project clean-up), or just check the amount of hard drive space the project is taking up in totality.

I think I’m going to play with this idea. If the script works out, maybe it’ll be something worth integrating into Cinelerra itself.