[sf-lug] stop-action video animation editing on GNU-Linux at the Creative Arts Charter School!

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi,

Thanks to the work of Grant Bowman, Aaron Cohen, James Howard, and others,
the 7th and 8th grade students at the Creative Arts Charter School will
begin editing stop-animation video with KDEnlive this week in Maria
Jenerik's social studies class!  It is really awesome to see what the
students are doing.  They are painstakingly drawing cartoons, taking a
single shot, redrawing, taking a single shot, etc until they have 500
individual shots.  Some students are working with clay and doing the same
thing.  Some students are using video to do the same thing.

In any case, they are then going to load the video onto Jaunty Ubuntu
machines and editing the action with KDEnlive.  They will be able to
lengthen and shorten individual scenes; add music; add voice-over narration;
add title clips; and add special effects and transitions, all with Free Open
Source Software on re-purposed legacy PCs with 1 GB of RAM.  Many of you on
this list have helped to triage and build these machines, and so a great
deal of thanks is due also to each of you for making this effort possible.

I recall in 2003 when I first wanted to start shooting the Digital Tipping
Point movie, thinking that in order to make FOSS and GNU-Linux attractive to
the mainstream, we need to be able to do sophisticated things with video,
music, and photos.  If we want to avoid being boxed into a fringe movement
on the desktop, we really need to reach out to people and help them do stuf
that has emotional impact like video and music.  As Shuttleworth says, we
need to make Linux beautiful.  We need to make it relevant to the lives of
end users, people who understand the benefits, but not necessarily the
features or freedoms of Free Software.

It was a lot of hard work to get all of these videos put together today out
of the various components that we had here.  Grant Bowman can add the
details if he feels like it.  Mostly, the problem was due to the fact that
we had some odd-ball video cards on some of these machines, and a real
mish-mash of RAM as well.  Getting up to 1 GB on all 5 of the machines that
Grant put together today was not easy, given the components that we had
available to us.  Also, it was a really long day, and we did not break for
food all day long, and ate only snacks.

We are also lucky that we are working with a highly dedicated teacher, Maria
Jenerik, who has the grit and determination to pull together donated SLR
cameras, video cameras, tripods, and work all of this equipment into a very
complicated curriculum for 40 wiggly 7th and 8th graders, and all of it
during the worst economic crisis in 70 years, in the face of mind-numbing
budget cuts.  If you don't think that teachers are dedicated to their job,
you have not met Maria Jenerik.  She is a miracle worker.
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