Monthly Archives: September 2014

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GNOME 3.14 – The movie

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Video time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p8Prlu3owc
09-24-release-vid-snapshot

3.14 is out and holy gnome it is awesome. Even though I came under a bit of a time pressure in the end, it has been such a pleasure to create a video surrounding this release. I’d like to thank GNOME Foundation and Alexander Larsson for providing me the Chromebook pixel, which made room for some awesome animations this cycle. Furthermore, Karen Sandler and her husband Mike has once again created an outstanding voice-over, taking the video to a whole new level. Lastly, the GNOME Design team deserves huge credit for all the assets I use in my videos. Making them myself would take have taken me ages!

Do come with feedback. I’d be particularly interested in your thoughts on the new animation experiments I’m making. Happy release day!

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GNOME apps in three dimensional space

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The release of GNOME 3.14 is getting closer and closer and I’m trying my best to have the a video ready for release. The manuscript is still open for revision but is at its final stages. Voice-over should finish around next week or so. And in the meantime I am testing a new workflow in Blender.

Alexander Larsson sent me a Chromebook Pixel a few weeks ago. What is really cool about a Pixel for me, is  its 2560x1700px screen. All my source material for the GNOME 3.14 release video can now recorded in high resolution. That opens up some cool animation possibilities.

vlcsnap-2014-09-09-07h12m12s213The picture below is a snapshot from a video, which as you might notice is very high resolution.  This is all possible thanks to GNOME’s Hi-DPI support (which rocks!).  What you can see in the background, is a very green wallpaper. That’s a virtual “green screen” which I will remove from the video material afterwards with Blender (see below).

09-09 green-screenAnd now is where the magic happens. Because the video is so high resolution, it means I can import the video as a texture onto an animatable plane in 3D space.  On low resolution video this would turn the video into a blurry mess, but the high resolution video looks unaffected.  It means I get some new animation possibilities. The screenshot below is a demonstration.

09-09 crazy effects

..I’m definitely excited to make this release video. :)