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

[Michael Shiloh]

This is wonderful news. Congratulations!

Christian Einfeldt wrote:
> 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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