Talk Summary

Traditional 2D animation has always been an expensive medium, primarily because each frame of animation must be drawn by hand. Even with today's digital inking and painting software, the process still relies on individuals hand-drawing each individual frame. This laborious task is called ``tweening''.

Two years ago Robert Quattlebaum, a DigiPen alumni, set out to create Synfig—a 2D vector animation package specifically designed for the efficient production of feature-film quality 2D animation. The purpose of this software was to dramatically improve individual animator efficiency via the elimination of the tweening process, thus reducing the cost of 2D animation production.

In early 2004 he founded Voria Studios LLC, an animation production studio that utilizes Synfig for all of its animation production requirements. Voria's production environment consists almost entirely of open-source projects, such as OpenOffice.org, FireFox, Novel Evolution, and the Gimp; with all of the animator workstations running Gentoo Linux.

This talk will discuss the implications and mechanisms behind Synfig, in addition to techniques and examples. Several animations created using this process will be shown, as well as a live demonstration of Synfig Studio. Robert will also be discussing various aspects of how Voria was bootstrapped, Voria's production environment, the decision to make open-source software such an integral part of that production environment, and the challenges/benefits of having the animators use a GNU/Linux operating system.