Episode: 1458
Title: HPR1458: Free Culture and Open Animation
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1458/hpr1458.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:29:09

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This interview with Julia Velkova and Konstantin Dimitriyev, which shed some light on free
culture, open animations, Sinfik Studio and the Russian anime being developed by the Morevna
Project, today on Hacker Public Radio, which open and creative commons animated movies
can you name. Yeah, all right, all right, but if we remove the blender projects like Elephant's
Dream, Big Buck Bunny and Sintel, how many can you name them? None? Yeah, right. Why is this?
It might be because creating an animated movie is hard, and it can be because many enthusiasts
start projects up, but they soon die off, unfortunately, but it can also be that it's hard
to reach out with these kind of projects. The state of this area of interest is what Julia Velkova
has concentrated her research on. At FScon's 2012, she gave the first half of a presentation,
painting a picture of the state of matters, then followed by open animator Konstantin Dimitriyev,
who introduced both the Morevna Project and the free and open source tool Sinfik Studio.
At this presentation, Konstantin showed the first-ever trailer for his anime movie,
The Beautiful Queen Maria Morevna, a modernised version of a traditional Russian tale.
Both the trailer and Julian Konstantin's presentation are available on YouTube. These two
very interesting people gave me 40 minutes of their time to take me by the hand and lead me down
the rabbit hole of modern, open animation. So my name is Julia Velkova, I live here in Gothenburg,
in Sweden, but I've started just recently in September, PhD in media and communication studies
at Suttertown University, which is Stockholm, Sweden. It's a new, rather new and small university,
and my project that I'm doing research on is on open animation films.
And since I've been working on that just for two months, there's not much I could present
from my own research, but about, well, in the beginning of the year, I got in touch with Konstantin.
Maybe you should present it.
Konstantin Tmitriyev, my name is Konstantin Tmitriyev.
No, but I got in touch with him because one of my case studies in my research is the project
that Konstantin is working on, Maria Morevna project. And I thought that it would be cool if we could
participate in FS Combs and present something together. So of course, most of the presentation
was actually the work of Konstantin because, well, he has been working on that for the last five
years. And I've worked on that on my research only two months, but what I tried to do in the
beginning as an introduction of our talk was to make an overview of what open animation films
exist and what projects there are. Because for my research, I tried to find a list of such projects,
there was absolutely nothing. And it took me a really big effort and I had to get tips from other
people from the community as to what projects exist. It's really hard to find them. And
they're called sometimes open animation projects. They're called free software films or open films
or whatever. But if it's not appearing in Google, it's essentially impossible to find. So
the goal of my presentation was to make a chronological overview of the projects that we know about
and in what status of development there are. And then we focused on Maria Morevna projects.
And most of those projects I had never heard about. I knew about a blend of projects and I think
one of the others you mentioned. Will this list be available somewhere? Yeah, I actually thought to
put it in the next few days. Well, I have actually a blog that I just started, which is free
culture.nordconst.org. So probably it will be indexed by Google and so it's possible. But yeah,
Wikipedia is also a good place. There is a list which is made in 2010, 20 open source movies.
But it's not updated since then. And it's not only animations, but my list is only animations.
All right. Which are open. However, not all projects are free. I mean, they have different licenses
and different distribution conditions. But that's I plan to include those in the list. But it will
be published in few days. And Constantine, your project. Yes. Five years, was it? Yes, five years.
I am the head of Moravana project and animation project, which is targeted on creating
free culture, anime, movie. Well, also I'm working on this project since 2007.
And right at the moment, we have just finished it. A first animated short. A demo of the project.
Which is five minutes long. And I'm here to here at FSconz to
present the results of my work to talk about them. And present this animated short. We made a first
premiere screening official premiere screen here yesterday. What's your goal? Is it a full feature
film or is it half an hour film? What is your final goal? Our final goal is a full feature film.
It's quite ambitious. But we have a full screenplay already for a whole movie. And now we finished
a demo. And it took a lot of time to make it done. But it was a very good experience. So
we have a plan to make a full movie episode by episode. So like a series. So it's much easier to
get a funding for one series than the whole movie. And it's much easier to release often.
Really, really often. Yes. So people won't forgot about us. We finished a movie. And also at the end,
we can teach all episodes together and release them again as a movie.
And there are a lot of other cool opportunities in making a series. We have a lot of ideas about
well. So I live in Russia and I took a chance to get here and present my work.
Wonderful. Why anime? Why that particular style, that genre?
Well, it's about my personal preferences because I'm a big anime fan. And this project is started
just because I wanted to make anime. And at the same time, I'm a big open source fan. And
I said, I want to make anime and I want to make it with open source software. Because I
am a big fan of Linux. And I want to show how cool this operating system could be for animation.
Also, I'm a part of St.Fix Studio development team. St.Fix Studio is a software for animation,
which is our main tool for animation. So we're trying to improve software by doing our projects.
As well. Yeah, I downloaded St.Fix Studio and I tried to do a specific task in mind.
But I felt that it, like all complex tools, it was a bit much to get into. I felt the same thing
you feel when you sit in front of Blender the first time. Exactly. I felt just amazed how much
you had to know just to get the basics done. But I think I'll manage. I'll get through.
It was, it is an impressive piece of software. Yeah, so it's very impressive piece of software
from my point of view. Because it has some interesting features that I miss in other software.
I have had an experience working with other software before,
or proprietary, I mean, before I come to Linux, etc. But St.Fix is now, I can say that St.Fix is
the only tool that I found suitable for our targets. And of course, it's much less developed
than the Blender. We like behind Blender for five years, I think. But I think it's possible to
just go, just continue and we can keep improving and we can reach the same level.
But Blender has a lot of people working on it. How many are working at St.Fix Studios now?
Well, I'm going to develop as you have roughly one, two, two and a half.
Something like that, because that's not always negative. You can be more focused when you're
fewer people. So it's not always negative. Yes, but in our case, it's negative because we miss
dedicated developers. There are a lot of people around who contribute to code randomly. But
the lack of dedicated developers is a problem. We have a lot of ideas which we really want to
implement. But we are on the lack of resources because I have to do an animation project and
I have to do an animation and I have to do development. And also, there is a lot of time
takes on administration of the project both. More than a project in St.Fix because we need to
maintain website, documentation, video tutorials, etc. I want to mention, but I'm not the core
developer of St.Fix. I'm just contributing minor things. So my role is not that big there.
But we're all going on the record now telling the world that you need more developers.
Yes, yes. But what to specify then, because hackers, they want to scratch their own
itch. What is the width of possibility with St.Fix so that they can feel that, all right, this is
something I could use. This is something I would like to contribute to. Yes. Is it only animations?
Is it only anime? Is it only what is the scope of the project? Of my revenue project.
No, St.Fix. St.Fix. What can you do with it? You can do animation. Not necessary anime, but
two-dimensional animation. That's the target of the project. And when do you do two-dimensional
animation other than when you create an animated movie? Can you use it in other circumstances?
You've been doing some commercial projects with that. Was it weren't you?
Yes, I've been doing some commercial projects in 2011.
What is that? What kind of project is that?
It's a commercial promise and something like that. In fact,
the more than a project was more than a project demo was developed so long because
we haven't had a good motivation to finish it or we haven't believed. We believed, but
we needed something to raise our belief that it could be finished. We could finish with
current resources, at least to the demo. In 2011, we have made a commercial project and then
we found, yes, we can. We can work on deadlines, we can finish, we can get results and it's
acceptable by people. But wasn't it the commercial projects weren't they made also with St.Fix?
Yes, commercial projects down the St.Fix. We started to realize how much time we need for
particular tasks. It was a very good experience for us. That's why the main progress of
Marevan projects was done in 2011. After we did commercial projects and that was a very good
experience. Talking about commercial projects, is this your main income source or do you have an
ordinary job? This is a hobby project for you. Yes, this is a hobby project for me and
yes, commercial projects was a good income for me. The main at 2011. But
I have an ordinary work in fact, but it's not much income. But anyway, I can manage to live with it.
It's a work which is teaching animation to kids. I'm doing that for 11 years already.
And the teacher never gets much paid. Well, right, but at the same time, it's much fun.
It is. I'm a teacher as well, you see. Yeah. What ages do you teach?
And from 14 to 18 years. All right. Now I'm 16 to 18. So it's actually the same. It's very
interesting. It is. And teach them with St.Fix. Yes. Now, right now, we teach them with St.Fix
for three years already. How do the kids take this? Are they enthusiastic? Do they feel empowered
by the software? Do they feel that they can do fun things? Do they react? Well, in fact,
when I'm teaching, I'm quite despotic person. So when we come and they see the Linux all around,
they just have no choice. But the times are getting good because nowadays,
kids are aren't scared of Linux. And in fact, they, even before, they are much less scared of
Linux than older people because they have no previous experience. And they say, okay,
that's different. Okay, I don't know anything about computers. Well, okay. And they accept it very
easily. And they work with it without problems. Well, and I think they have no problems working
with St.Fix because that's what I'm teaching to them. And some, most of them don't have
experiences with others. But some others who have, who study for four or more years
in my classes, they like St.Fix very much. What kind of commercial proprietary software are there
that is comparable to St.Fix? The very similar software is Animes Studio,
which was called Mojo when I was looking into it in 2007. Well, it have some features.
It's much, it's more stable than St.Fix, and more fast. But from my point of view, it likes some
important features that I don't dare to use this project for my big movie. I have
worked with Adobe Flash, Animes Studio, and then don't dare to use them. But... Well, Flash is used
for a lot of cartoons today. Yes, but it's not suitable for our targets.
It's hard to explain this without diving into deep into technology. So that's my subjective
experience. And of course, St.Fix is very slow. St.Fix is very unstable sometimes, a lot of bags,
but... Well... How is it unstable? I mean, audacity, for me, has been very unstable. It crashes all
the time. But I've never lost any work because it always manages to save it and just starts right
off. How is St.Fix regarding that? Do you lose work if it's unstable? Well,
sometimes it's crashes, but it has auto-saving features. But sometimes it doesn't work,
because the interval could be too high, five minutes. But in general, the amount of... I don't
we don't lose much work with St.Fix, because we are persons who tend to save often. And there
is no such cases when you migrate to some new development feature and it breaks your file.
There were no such cases. So you have all your data saved. And partly because the St.Fix file format
is XML. So if something even, if something goes wrong, you can open it and edit by hand. So
I've never lost anything by using development features. Well, if we're talking about St.Fix development
and as I go, some hackers will listen for us and maybe some of them will be interested in
development. I would like to outline the possible ways to contribute to St.Fix. Absolutely.
Maybe someone will be interested to get into implementing a particular feature. Right at the
moment, the main developer of St.Fix, Carlos López Gonzales, is working on speeding up St.Fix.
He tries to, well, he made a lot of progress with using Cairo libraries. But there is a room,
still a room for improvement here. For example, to try to use Cairo OpenJail,
backhand and I guess it could be much faster, but we need someone, maybe someone will be
interesting to investigate this. The next things that I will mention, they are things needed for
the Continuen Marevna project. They are important for this. I will mention some things that will
important or required to continue. First of all, is sound support. Because if you watched the demo,
I guess you noticed that it is like music video. No speech, so you don't need to, we
haven't need to do lip syncing. So we didn't work to be sound much. Right at the moment,
St.Fix have no sound support, no syncing features. And for next episode, that will be critical.
Because there will be speech, I promise. People chart you, we'll talk.
And I have an idea to implement Jack support. That wouldn't take much time because we
are planned to use Ardur anyway for sound mixing. And it uses Jack and if their timelines will be
synched, that will be awesome. And I believe that integration Jack into Synfic wouldn't take much time.
It's one of easy task. Easy level task. And you say easy task. I opened other ones, just try to
record something, a little sound clip, anything, took me hours.
Well, another one interesting task is improving the way how the tablet tools in Synfic.
When you use a graphic tablet with a pen, I'm interested in making Synfic more adapted for pen
input. And there is already some papers in publish it around the web that
with formulas, there is all math that about some interesting ways. And we have already a concept
how to make it more simple, more human intuitive. But there's no one takes on this yet. It's just
a concept. But it's inspired by the, I would like to mention this project, not open source.
I love sketch. You just Google, you can just Google this. I love sketch. It's a project where you
sketch 3D models by pen. And it's very intuitive. It's awesome. And they have published some papers.
Most of them are patented. But the basic one about two-dimensional
curious drawing is not patented. So it could be used to implement such things in Synfic.
Well, that's it. What kind of, what problem, program language is it written in Synfic?
C++. It's C++. All right. That's fun. Interesting. All right, to go back to the real animation,
the Murevna project. What kind of outline do you have? Do you think you will have the next episode
ready? What? Month, year, two years? What? Okay. Just a ballpark. Not a set date, of course.
Oh, we already think about thoughts about it. We have a plan. Well, first two months,
the last two months of this year, I will dedicate to post-production.
My plan is to, well, finish the things that aren't finished. For example, we have added a few
features in Synfic, especially for Murevna project. But they are not
in go into official branch. So next, our target is to make them go into official master branch.
All right. And release a new version of Synfic, that's my plan. And so the next step, another step
is to make an art book. I think that will be interesting for people if they will have
art book about the demo showing all the working interesting working artwork with maybe with some
comments and showing the internals of the Murevna project demo. And maybe we will most probably,
we will print them and make them available for purchase, purchase, purchase. But of course,
the PDF will be available under the Creative Commons license. And another step is to make a DVD.
We need to investigate this as well how it could be organized in Russia and shipping,
delivery, etc. And let me ask you, when you prepare from Synfic studio to create a DVD or an art book
in 3D animation, you compile it, you render it, right? That's the term. But in 2D animation,
is it something similar? Absolutely, absolutely similar. So you render the 2D?
Yes, we render 2D animation. That's necessary. And it takes much time. Well, less than 3D, of course.
Well, and the next steps of Murevna project is, well, I've already told what we plan to release
as a series. Right. Okay. So in January, we will start to look for funding for next episode.
Maybe it will be some company. Maybe it will be crowdfunding. I don't know. But anyway,
whatever it will be, I still would like to keep the project independent. So it's better to have
no funding, but keep project independent. So no one will put censorship on it, no one will dictate
anything of it. We want to keep independent, no matter what. And in fact,
consider the current resources we have. The production, our experience show that the production
of a new episode can fit into 10 months. So if everything will go smoothly, we might have
the next episode in December of 2013. Wow. Maybe it's right at the moment. It all comes to funding
because this episode with the demo was done almost without no funding. But the next one,
we should look into it. That's it. Interesting. Interesting. But this 2D isn't that usual. When you
researched, Julia, when you looked at the different projects, how many were in 2D?
I don't know exactly the number, but it was not more than three or four out of 17.
At least Sita. Yes, Sita. I think Sita sings the blues.
Most successful, I think. That's the most successful one because it's a full-featured film,
but it was made by one person and it took her five years. And I know that she struggled a lot
with releasing the film under creative comments because the music was not free. And she wrote on
her website that she had to take about $50,000 in bank loan to buy off the rights and then
released everything including the music under creative comments with the remark that this might
not be exactly correct because she bought off the rights only for this film. So potentially any
remakes might not have the rights to use this music. But yeah, I found it actually quite interesting
that it seems that when I was discussing it, Constantine, the details about Moriavna project.
I think it's with 2D. It's something different because 3D, everyone wants to do 3D because it's
hype, it's fashionable. But 2D is, on one hand, more classical form, but it also seems to have
a lot of genres and you can go in different paths. While in 3D animations, it seems that there is
no genre formed right now. It's all about making characters look realistic and affecting like
really, yeah, to grab your attention and impress you. While I think there is much more maybe
artistic or creative, or it's different kind of work, I believe, in 2D. It feels more
handcrafted. Yes, yes. Despite that it's probably made from scratch by computers. Yeah, of course.
What is it today? Yeah. What I would like to add about music? One of the problems
of the project, the Moriavna project was the soundtrack. Well, in fact,
I have created that problem by myself because I initially wanted to use the
some non-free, totally non-free soundtrack, but we wanted to try to acquire permission to use it.
But unfortunately, that didn't work. So, at the last moment, we have forced to change the soundtrack
and look for good substitution. Luckily, I found out some artists, Stefano Machini,
which releases his tracks under creative commons, non-commercial and genre like license, but they
have a song with, I believe, they have a song with the demo. And as many people say who watched
the both versions, they feel even better than my first plan. My first choice, right.
Anyway, we wanted to make our project as free as possible, so we released all our work, I mean,
visual, under creative commons attribution. But the fact that we use the soundtrack
under creative commons, non-commercial, genre like, make us release the final product, the demo,
under the same license with non-commercial restriction. And many people complain now after that
about that. Well, and partly, I understand them. And what we would like to do, maybe we will be
able to convince the original author to release a license, to release the tracks for the project.
And there is one more interesting thing to mention. One music band from Lagrange, who recorded a
special song for Marevna Project Demo. Unfortunately, they didn't manage to get this song
finish it to the deadline. That's why we have, well, postponed their contribution for better
times. And in fact, I would like to make some improvements to their song. But they
would like to provide their song on the most permissive license. And so if we will get it finished,
we will have an alternative release. It will be with different mood because they are rock band.
So I think that could be interesting to have a different view on the demo and alternative versions.
So maybe free culture lovers, where we will finally get what we want to. Who knows?
Or they can make it themselves. Yeah, sure, yes. They can remix. This is a Russian anime.
Are there any more Russian anime? Oh, yes. When it was 2007, when the project started, we thought,
oh, we will be the first Russian anime. But we are not the first Russian anime because
somewhere in 2009, there was released a real first Russian anime, which called First Squad.
It was written, the screenplay was written by Russian, and one producer was Russian,
and it was about Russia. All right, of course. But the thing is that my production was done in
Japan. So it was done by the Japanese director and Japanese artists. But still, everyone
counted as Russian anime. No, of course.
When you looked at different projects or any of them based in Japan,
is creative comms big in Japan? I know that the current Asia-Pacific creative commons leader,
I believe if I'm not wrong, is actually in Japan. I know that creative commons exist in Japan,
but I have not seen any animation coming from there, which is open or based on a free software,
I think most of the productions are actually European or Latin American.
And what happens in between? There's maybe something happening. I think it could be
the language problem, because for example, I saw that Marievina project script was translated
in Chinese last week, but of course, for me, it's impossible to find.
So it would be good, actually, if I published this list, maybe someone who knows about some
other projects could start contributing to expand this list, even if it's other languages,
because I believe it's too little awareness of what's going on, while there's a lot of projects
with very big potential and very interesting and promising. That's an interesting point,
absolutely. All right, finally then, if you would like with a few sentences, just plug one thing,
what would that be? Well, that would be contributing to something that would be the most appreciated
thing for me. Well, that's it. That's it. Thank you. I would say I just support open animation projects,
because they carry a lot of potential for innovation, and there's a lot of field of playing with things
that you cannot do in another way, and there's something very new and hype that even your children
can look at. So there's very big, it could be rewarding to see the result. And you mentioned your
blog before, are there any other way in which people can reach your work? Well, since I've started,
I will be probably tweeting about it, my tweeting Twitter is Jay Velkova,
but yeah, people should just maybe hang on the blog. Right, and I'll link to those in the show notes
for this episode, of course, and where do people reach your work? Yes, they can reach
the Morevna project through the MorevnaProject.org website. You're always welcome there.
Yeah. Wonderful. Great. Thank you. Thank you.
My parting words there meant thank you and goodbye in Russian.
Frays I waited years to find a use for. Julius blog seems to have moved, but she is very active
on Twitter, so keep an eye on her there. Constantly in sometimes broadcast live from his classroom
in Russia, showing what his students do and how they interact with Sinfig Studio. Keep an eye out
for that as well. Constantly has used IndigoGo to crowdfund a full-time developer for Sinfig Studio.
He started with this late 2013, and he has been reaching the goal for every campaign,
for every month, so far, so keep an eye out for the current campaign. Go, help the Morevna
Project and Sinfig Studio. Follow both Julia and Constantly on Twitter to get updates on this
very interesting part of the free and open community that I think we sometimes might forget.
All the relevant links will be as usual in the show notes. You find me and my podcast,
they're all in IT radio in the usual places. Make sure you follow me. This is CT, signing off.
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