It looks to me as though I started the Freefilm
Project too early. There wasn't enough acceptance that
the idea was viable, and there wasn't enough interest
by the amateur filmmakers to actually make much
headway. As such, the project is in cryogenic
suspension until I can round up enough people to give
it a serious crack.
This is not to say it's dead. If you'd like to help,
then by all means! The more activity that takes place,
the more likely it is that the necessary momentum can
be reached.
One project I've been working on-and-off on is to
adapt a wordprocessing package for script editing AND
storyboarding. There are some old (and slightly stale)
patches for Abiword, but it should be simple enough to
freshen those up and produce something similar for
Open Office and KOffice. But scriptwriting isn't just
about getting the fonts and placement right. There
would need to be some good templates, tools and
possibly some sort of validator.
That's the scriptwriting. At present, I know of no
good tool for storyboarding. This is something a
project of this kind would absolutely require.
My vision, though, is to go one step further: Have the
wordprocessor in the left-hand side of a split pane,
and the storyboard in the right-hand side, aligned
such that the storyboard for a scene was always
adjacent to that scene.
How is this interesting? It's just a layout thing,
right? Not quite. By labelling each individual scene,
and marking their end-points, you could attach the
actual film clip to that section. All the clips would
be organized by these labels, so if you add a scene,
it would make space for it in the compiled movie
sequence, and if you delete a scene, it would not
compile that clip in. Likewise, moving the scene to a
different part of the script would move the film clip
accordingly.
So far, that sounds great, right? Maybe. The problem
is, I'm approaching films from the standpoint of a
coder, with scripts, headers and compilers. That is
not necessarily how amateur filmmakers work. I'm not
even sure it's remotely close to how animators work.
That doesn't necessarily mean anything - movies and
scripts were around a long time before computers, so
had to focus on methods that didn't require vast
amounts of subtle data manipulation. On the other
hand, just because new technologies allow for
different methods, it doesn't mean the other methods
are any good. On the third hand (well, there may be
apace aliens on the list!), even if the concept of
parallel segment development was actually a good
method, would anyone use it? (Pick a wordprocessor,
and count the features you've never used, never heard
of anyone using, and will likely never find anyone who
had a use for them)
--- Kevin Nolan <kevnolan@...> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I was just watching Akira and my mind started to
> wander. And suddenly I
> thought I had came up with a great and original
> idea. Why not develop a
> community based film, using the internet as an
> administrator. Great idea but
> not original as a quick google search revealed.
>
> So I'm just wandering what the project status is at
> at the moment? Looking
> at your website the last update was early last year.
> If it needs another
> boost I could be of help. I'm a web designer with
> fair bit of development
> experience. And I've made quite a lot of flash
> animations (almost an hours
> worth at this stage). Mostly of a crude South Park
> style.
>
> I've got a pile of questions to annoy you with, but
> let me know if the
> project is still a runner and if I even visited the
> latest website (
> http://freefilm.sourceforge.net/news.html).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kevin Nolan
>
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