Hello Creative Commons fans!

This month we've been busy beavering away with some animation, and have (for the first time I think) relented and used some non-free software in the production of this little existential tale.

"Oscar's Ontological Odyssey" can be found here:

http://oscar.commonshostage.com/

It stars a florescent felt crocodile named Karl, and his friend Oscar who, it turns out, doesn't really know what he is. Their conversation about that fact soon becomes mired in existential questions and doubt until the two set off on a quest to finally sort out the nature of existence by vesting the mysterious Penguin.

The felt creatures were made with a cheap children's toy felt kit, which were then digitized with a simple digital camera and edited using the Gimp to break them down into their component parts for animation.

Next, once the script was written (with no improvisation help from @robolollycop despite his promise) with trusty Vim and then recorded and edited into shape with Audacity. The squelching mud sounds were recorded with a hand full of washing up liquid and water, squeezing the palms together.

All that remained for the sound was to find some suitable background music, so a quick search of the Soundcloud CC archives found a "Fingers In The Noise" track, the first third of which, looped, gave the piece the slow and plodding mood it needed. Thanks to Fingers In The Noise for that, you should check out their other songs, they have quite the variety of music.

With the soundtrack in the can, or on the hard-drive, it was time to begin the animation process. After a short time being frustrated and confused by ktoon, and with time (as always) a factor here we decided that we'd resort to using proprietary software, since we already knew more or less how to do ahead with that. Luckily, we already had a license to use it since we need it for our day-job. So "Flash" was launched, PNG images imported and the slow tedious process of animation began.

The whole scene was animated as a huge 1900 pixel wide-screen thing, with the intention of moving it over to Cinerella, our video-editor of choice, for pan-scan and zooming later to make the visual scene more interesting.

Exporting that file to Cinelerra was more tricky than we had first hoped. Every time we used Quicktime to export the movie, Cinerella (and indeed every application we tried) refused to see any actual video or audio streams within the file. This was annoying in the extreme. Eventually, after much frustration, we found that exporting it into iMove, and then out again (still through quicktime) produced an avi file which we could actually get non-Apple products to recognise.

Animation, it turns out, is a slow and tedious processes which is almost as slow and annoying as trying to get computer applications to recognise each other's data.

Still, all this is complete now, and so we're able to present to you "Oscar's Ontological Odyssey". If you like it and would like to see episode two created, then donate. Only twenty pounds in the tip-jar will ensure episode two's publication around a month after we reach that target. If you can't afford to donate, forward the link to all your richer friends, or just spread it around and retweet it. The more people who see it, the more likely we are to find generous sponsors for the next episode.

Hope you enjoy this month's film. See you next month.