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!

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

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.

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

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.

We’re quite pleased with their assessment and even happier to announce that we’re working with CmiVFX on the second advanced training DVD for Blender in that series. Look for an official announcement of the DVD to come in the near future!

The Digital Animation track at Red Hat High was the most popular track with students in 2006 and had the largest class size this year with 15 students attending. Other tracks at the camp included Audio, Illustration, Digital Darkroom, and Programming featuring other open source tools such as Hydrogen, Audacity, Inkscape, and The GIMP.

Red Hat intends to expand the Red Hat High program to other locations throughout the world and is in the process of developing materials to aid teachers in developing curricula that suit their needs. The team of Blender instructors is actively involved in this process. As part of this, Jason will be giving a QuickTake presentation about Red Hat High at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego.

More Information

• Video of student work on Sheep-dot
• Article on Blender Nation
• Red Hat Magazine Articles
  • Red Hat High 2007: Getting Started
  • Red Hat High 2007: Update
• Red Hat High flickr stream

On the last day of the conference, attendees will be able to participate in a small presentation on “Connecting Families, Kids and Students Through Digital Media”. Jason will be doing a short run-though on modeling with Blender while Steve Simmons of EDR Media will be discussing audio gaming and Ted Jordon of Funutation LLC will give a session on computer game creation.

The Defrag conference is held quarterly around Ohio and is geared toward offering “an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to address our innovation imperative in rich media, with a focus on education and workforce development.” They’re really interested in open source software as being a part of that equation.

We’ve also reorganized our animation and print portfolios to be more attractive and easy to use, as well as incorporating the more ubiquitous Flash video codec for showing our animations (rather than storing 3 different formats). You may also notice that we have a new section on our site for training, too. There you can get information on the various workshops we offer, training DVDs, and even individualized training/consultation services.

As you can see, there’s all kinds of interesting new things going on here. Have a look around and check out all the fun stuff!

Also, more information and links regarding the SIGGRAPH trip can be found on sheep-dot, our side projects blog.