3D animation, compositing, and editing for this television spot was all done using Blender. GIMP and the GIMP Animation Package were used for the hand-drawn animation and cleaning up the masking on individual frames. We had a pretty quick turnaround time for this (about 2 weeks to produce the whole thing, including shooting the hand, recording audio, composing music, and creating the final animation and composite), but it was a ton of fun to produce and we’re quite happy with the results.

Last weekend, Grey Justice was screened at the Byrd Theatre with the other competing entries. With the ‘Best of Richmond’ screening held this weekend, we’re proud to announce that our work was recognized by winning two (TWO!) awards: Best Use of Character and Best Special Effects. Woohoo!

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!

“Elephants Dream” is an 11-minute short film produced by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands. The film was released as an ‘Open Movie’. What’s an Open Movie? It’s a movie that comes with all of the production files used to create it. Don’t like the way the film was made? You have the files to make it your way! Want to find out how they created that awesome effect? You can look and see exactly how it was done! And not only that, all of the visuals for this film were created using freely available Open Source Software. So you have the tools, too! All for free.

“So waitaminute,” you say, “you’re organizing the screening of someone else’s movie? What gives?” Yes. Yes we are. It’s a great short film and the small team of artists who created it are our friends. Not only that, but since the film and just about everything around it is free and open, we figure this is a great way to get to know the rest of the creative community in the Richmond area.

Come on out to C3 and watch this movie with us. Find out a little bit about what went into the making of it. Share your thoughts on it with others in the community. Maybe even lay the groundwork for your own project! Admission is free, but donations to C3 are welcome.

For more information feel free to email me (groo at handturkeystudios dot com). You can also get some more information about “Elephants Dream” at www.elephantsdream.org.

We will be offering it under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, so it’s very easy. For bandwidth considerations, though, we can’t just post a link to the file. So, if anyone is interested in using this animation, we simply ask that you send an email to firefoxlogo@handturkeystudios.com. We’ll take care of everything from there and get you everything you need.

Update: Thanks for all the interest we’ve gotten for this! As a point of clarification, this gift is not limited to those entering the Firefox Flicks contest. Anyone who wishes to use this animation for their own purposes is welcome to do it. Simply drop us an email and we’ll get you the file. Again, thanks so much for the kind words and interest.