I’m Bastian Ilsø, nice to meet you. I am a 2nd semester Medialogy student who use and participate in GNOME. You can mostly find me as “bastianilso” on #engagement and on #gnome-design at GimpNet IRC.

Picture of me by Jakub Steiner. Scribus, AAU, Blender, Gimp, WordPress and Linux logos are used for identification only.

My most visible contribution so far has been the GNOME 3.12 release video. Since then, I have decided that promotional videos is something I want to continue doing and I currently have one in the works.

This blog is mostly going to be about GNOME. The GNOME project is awesome. It opens a door for me to get behind the scenes and learn. However, much of what I learn and blog about can also be applied in a wider context.

I’m definitely looking forward to meet the rest of the planet at GUADEC 2014. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your daily reading at Planet GNOME as much as I do!

Title: Promotional Video about GNOMEs Documentation
Started: April 21st 2014
Deadline: July 26th 2014
Status: voice-over done, recording video material, brainstorming animations.

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The GNOME Documentation Video marks my 2nd video for GNOME and I expect it to be finished before GUADEC. Currently, I am writing down notes, sketching ideas and recording some video. The picture below is my current timeline in Blender’s VSE (red are video recording notes, blue are animation notes).

Having notes in the timeline is super flexible for me because I like to work a little bit on everything and revising the design over and over. I expect to have 5-6 layers of material, starting from audio, notes and sketches, to video-recorded material/animations and finally transitions and sound effects.

This time I am spending more time tinkering with various workflows, exploring Blender’s various capabilities and finding the best way I can use the tools I have available. Concretely this means that I am moving much of the work previously done in the compositor into 3D space (cycles) or the VSE. My aim with this is to utilize blender’s real-time rendering as much as possible, so I don’t have to pre-render parts of the video when I make changes. I am also taking Jakub Steiner’s advice and trying to keep everything within one file which I am trying to keep tidy.

Thanks to Karen Sandler who provided me with a great voice-over. It is super motivating to work on a video like this when you have a high-quality crisp voice to work with. Looking forward to be showing off some initial work soon.