Previously, I demonstrated creating an animatic using Kino. That was an interesting exercise, but Kino is not really up to that kind of job. Blender, on the other hand, has a very nice "video sequence ...
Apple is doing it again: they are releasing an app store for OS X on the 6th of January. Just like the iPhone app store, and the Android app store, this is going to be a hit: the OS X ecosystem will g ...
My DVD set for the Blender Foundation's latest open movie, "Sintel," arrived this month. Considering the size, expense, and duration of the production, it's a truly amazing short film. There's much mo ...
There are lots of options for creating 3D characters for animation, and they are often made from scratch by mesh-modeling artists. But it's obviously a very often-needed task, using a lot of common el ...
Rote learning of "math facts" is one of the really dull aspects of grade-school mathematics. But if you can't recall them quickly, it can really hold you back even in higher mathematical disciplines, ...
Counting your blessings is good for the soul -- not to mention for convincing yourself and any investors that your project will succeed. Free culture is highly conservative, because it's possible to s ...
Last night, I spent about 3 hours finally gaining "root" for my Motorola Backflip (starting from midnight...). As far as I am concerned, last night my Backflip wasn't _actually_ mine. Now, it is. I ca ...
Basecamp alternatives When 37Signals created Basecamp, they filled a huge void in the project management market: the world was full of people who needed to actually manage projects and communicate, ra ...
Ryan Cartwright has written an article on how to backup Gmail with Getmail. It is an excellent piece, but Getmail is a command line program, and while most readers of FSM will doubtless be at home the ...
We are all accustomed to the concept of TODO lists. You might have a shopping list in your pocket right now, or a piece of paper in the shed with a list of things that need to be done around the garde ...
Sometime back I gave a pretty strong pan review of a couple of "toys" that were not compatible with GNU/Linux -- with _open standards_ really, since the community ensures that free software is complia ...
People have been talking about "micropayments" since the early days of the world-wide-web, so I'm always skeptical of micropayment systems. Flattr is an interesting variation on the idea though. It's ...
Often, when modelling in 3D, it's necessary to create a "backdrop" panoramic image. Typically this shows sky and distant land which should appear behind the foreground action. One place we'll need thi ...
One of the great advantages of using a free license for a work is that you can re-use a growing body of free-licensed source material to help you do it. But it can seem a little daunting to find the m ...
I found a useful sound effect in an online video from NASA which replaces an earlier temporary sound I used in a scene soundtrack for the _Lunatics_ pilot, "No Children in Space." I'm going to extract ...
For _Lunatics_, we need several space vehicles. For a few of them, we have existing free-licensed computer models that we can use, but others are not so easy, or need customizations. The Soyuz launch ...
How do you get a flurry of images in your head into a concrete description of a film so that you can produce it? One important step is to create storyboards. For the storyboards on _Lunatics_, I've us ...
Sometimes life is very circular. Once upon a time, I was a film major. Then I was an astronomer, then I was unemployed for quite awhile, during which time I discovered free software, and as a result o ...
An animatic is a kind of a rough sketch for a film. It's not really meant to be an artform in itself (although some reach that point), but it is rather intended to be enough information for the filmma ...
As I was working on a sound track project for a science-fiction film I've been working on, I remembered reading an article in Free Software Magazine, by Gianluca Pignalberi, in which he described filt ...