Hand Turkey Studios is going to allow live public access to our production as we compete this coming weekend (17-19 July) in this year’s 48 Hour Film Project in Richmond, Virginia. We assembled a team and competed last year with the ambitious goal of completing an animation as our submitted work. Due to some technical difficulties last year (discussed in more detail in a presentation at the 2008 Blender Conference), we missed the deadline. However, the entire international team of talent from last year (plus some new additions!) has returned to do it again! And we’re amped to make this thing awesome.

As part of that goal, we are allowing public access to our work environment during the weekend of our production. Since our team is located throughout the world, we collaborate on our project through the Internet. We’ve opened some windows to that process so anyone can follow along as we make our animated short… four of them, to be exact:

• The Hand Turkey 48 Hour Film Project Wiki – This is our central collaborative tool. Brainstorms, sketches, designs, task lists and workflow descriptions all live here. Check out the Recent changes page to see the latest updates.
• #ht48hfp on freenode – We use IRC as our main means of real-time communication. If you have a preferred IRC client (Chatzilla, mIRC, Xchat, etc.), point it to the #ht48hfp channel on freenode.net. If you don’t have a client, you can use freenode’s web interface.
• Follow us on Twitter – The entire team has access to update that account, so any of us can let you know what’s going on.
• Streaming webcam footage – We are actually going to stream footage from webcams at the locations of some of our international team members so you can watch the craziness that ensues. We’re still hammering out the kinks on this, but we’ll have a direct link set up by Friday.

That’s it! Come watch us slave away this weekend and wish us luck!

The Connecticut Film Festival will be taking place from the 2nd to the 7th of June in Danbury, Connecticut. The festival features not only live-action filmmaking, but also animation, music, and interactive media like video games. Hand Turkey’s Jason van Gumster will be speaking on using Blender to produce animations on Friday, June 6th at 4:00 PM as well as sitting on a panel the following day entitled ABCs of CGI.

If you’re in or around Connecticut (and even if you’re not!), come on out. It’s sure to be a great event!

Hand Turkey Studios is proud to announce the release of Blender For Dummies by company co-founder, Jason van Gumster. Blender For Dummies is a beginner’s reference guide Blender, the freely available 3D modeling and animation suite used in all Hand Turkey animated projects.

The book is available just about anywhere you can purchase books, including Amazon and the Blender e-shop. Wiley Publishing has also provided a PDF file with the full table of contents as well as a sample chapter of the book. Use the following link to download the Blender For Dummies Sample Chapter.

A website has also been created to support the book at www.blenderbasics.com. The site currently has all of the project files included on the Blender For Dummies CD and will also be the home of a number of video tutorials to assist with the concepts covered in the book.

Stay tuned to this site for more Blender-training news from Hand Turkey Studios in the near future.

Blender: Compositing Techniques with Render Passes

In a partnership with CG Channel and cmiVFX, a second episode of free online tutorials was launched. This time around it’s a tutorial by Hand Turkey Studios’ Jason van Gumster covering composting techniques with render passes in Blender.

Registration is free, sign up today to get your free tutorial.

Update: We’ve decided to release the .blend file for this tutorial. You can find out more about this on sheep-dot.


http://www.cgchannel.com/
http://cgchannel.com/news/viewfeature.jsp?newsid=6763

Hand Turkey Studios recently created a logo for the open source Flash video player, FlowPlayer. FlowPlayer is a very useful player that can be embedded into any website to play videos in the Flash video format. It is used on such large sites as The Internet Archive and putfile.com, as well as Hand Turkey’s own animation portfolio page.

A detailed description of the process that was used to create this logo can be found on sheep-dot, Hand Turkey’s side projects blog.