Anyone can just pick up open source software and create
The project was an insane idea I had to send out a save the date for my son’s Bar Mitzvah coming up in about 6 months. We could have bought some pre-printed save the date annoucements. We could even have gone all net crazy and sent out email announcements or even evites to our family and friends. But no, that wouldn’t do for Alan Shimel, open source blogger at Network World and geek. I thought it would be really cool to send out a little video that would be funny, cute and make all my non-tech friends envious. What’s worse, is that both my son and wife loved the idea as much as me, so without really thinking it through we were off.
The idea was to make a parody of “The Natural” with my son playing the Robert Redford role. I was going to splice in footage from the movie with footage we shot here. That really turned out to be the easy part. I was able to grab some clips from The Natural on YouTube using a free service called Clip.dj. You can save the video as an MP4 file.
Then I used the great open source VLC media player. VLC is a great program that I use all the time to watch videos of my kids football team that I coach. I then had to shoot some of my own video using a an old Sony video camera I have that records to mini-DVD. I shot the 3 or 4 different parts that I was going to splice in at a local ballfield, came home and ripped them from the DVD to my computer.
To edit and splice the video I used Windows Live Movie Maker. Its free, but not open source. I have used it before and frankly is just the easiest video creator software I have ever used. I was able to cut and paste in my clips and it looked pretty good.
But I couldn’t stop there. I need soundtrack and credits. Adding music in the background was easy. I paid the 99 cents for the Natural theme and put that behind the video. But for the credits I got a little crazy. I decided I would use the 20th Century Fox type of presentation. With a little investigation I discovered that it was possible to “easily” custominze the Fox logo with whatever you wanted. WOW, now that was the kind of tech wizardry that my relatives and friends would really appreciate. So I looked into how do accomplish this easily.
That is what lead me to Blender. It turns out to change the Fox logo you need a 3d modeling program and have it rendered. Blender is what they say to use and there were several tutorials that made it seem easy. A few minutes later I had downloaded the open source Blender software. I won’t lie to you. At first glance I thought I was in over my head. In fact I probably was in over my head. But my only hope is that there was a pre-configured blender file for the Fox logo and all I had to do was change the text and re-render it. That made it a little easier, but even doing that caused me to dig in a little bit and learn Blender.
I am glad I did. What an open source gem Blender is! It has been around since at least 2002 as open source but even longer than that as non-open software. It really is widely supported with a great community. First let me give you a little history from the website and then I will tell you some more about Blender:
In 1988, Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. This studio quickly became the largest 3D animation house in the Netherlands. Within NeoGeo, Ton was responsible for both art direction and internal software development. After a careful deliberation it was decided that the current in-house 3D toolset needed to be rewritten from scratch. In 1995 this rewrite began and was destined to become the 3D software tool we all now know as Blender.
In 1998, Ton founded a new company called Not a Number (NaN), to further market and develop Blender. NaN’s business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender. In 2000 the company secured growth financing by several investment companies. Target was to create a free creation tool for interactive 3D (on-line) content, and commercial versions of the software for distribution and publishing.
Sadly, due to disappointing sales and the ongoing difficult economic climate, the NaN investors decided to shut down all operations early 2002. The shutdown also included discontinuing the development of Blender.
Enthusiastic support from the user community and customers couldn’t justify leaving Blender to disappear into oblivion. Since restarting a company with a sufficiently large team of developers wasn’t feasible, in May 2002 Ton Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation.
The Blender Foundation’s first goal was to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community based open source project. In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree on a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to open source Blender. The “Free Blender” campaign sought to raise 100,000 EUR, as a one-time fee so that the NaN investors would agree on open sourcing Blender. To everyone’s shock and surprise the campaign reached the 100,000 EUR goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday Oct 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Blender development continued since that day driven by a team of far flung dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender’s original creator, Ton Roosendaal.
The Blender Foundation has supported the release of several open film and open game projects.Many of these have been very acclaimed and won the project a lot of good will and publicity. Today the Blender community is extremely large. Here is a listing of just some of the Blender community sites that are in English (there are many different language community sites as well)
Planet Blender
As you can see, there are a lot of Blender fans out there!
So back to my project. While making the changes to the logo only took me a matter of minutes, once I was familiar with the interface, actually rendering the 3D animation is taking between 8 to 12 hours on my laptop. This is a bit of a drag, but I remember when doing this kind of stuff was only possible on a Silicon Graphics Workstation. So I consider myself lucky.
There is so much in Blender that you could play with it for months and still be learning. It is such a high quality product, open source, well documented and just rich on many levels. It is a testament to the best that open source has to offer.
BTW, after rendering the Fox-like logo I finished the rest of my video editing and am proud to say that the save the date is everything I wanted it to be thanks to some hard work on my part and some great open source software like Blender.
Below is the Fox-logo scene I created.
