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!