So recently I became a ‘Catalyst’ at C3. When you do that, apparently you get to write a little blurb about why you did it and send that with a photo of yourself. I’m not particularly partial to any of my recent photographs and my experiments with self-photography left, um… something to be desired. So… I took one of my bad self-photos as a reference and opened The GIMP. A little bit later this came out. It started as a regular sketchy line drawing with my Wacom tablet. I picked out the blocks I wanted to keep and re-drew them with cleaner lines. Then I ran it through a trace/simplify pass in Inkscape and played a bit with with The GIMP’s IWarp tool (which is loads of fun, by the way). I played a bit with coloring it, but (and I think most people would agree; I know the other Turkeys do) it looked just like crap. So I opted for the clean lines. I’m pretty happy with it.

Update: The blurb (and this drawing) are now on the C3 website.

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!