The Connecticut Film Festival is taking place in Danbury Connecticut on June 2-7. I’ll be in the Interactive Festival (part of the CTFF) making a small workshop focused on movie production using Free and Open Source software”Making 3-D Movies Using Free Software”, on June 5th at 5:40pm, and doing a panel “The ABC’s of CGI” the following day at 4:00pm. Another of our team, Jason Van Gumster (author of Blender for Dummies) is going to be on the panel as well, and is going to give a talk at 4:00pm on June 5th entitled “Completely Free Animation using Blender”.
If you’re in the area, come check it out! I’m sure there will be room for beer (or soda) and pretzels after.

I’m quite chuffed to be welcoming our newest team member, Gianmichele Mariani, a talented animator working in the UK, with a fantastic reel, an more importantly, a beautiful hat.
Seriously, check out his bio on the team page, and his web site for a sample of his work. I knew this blog was a good idea

Please view the following and report any bugs – I’m testing the html <video> element with a fallback for older browsers. This should work on the latest betas for safari and firefox; those of you on those browsers, please test and tell me if it works, for all other browsers we have our normal flash player.

some issues: I’m unable to see the “poster” image for the video element in firefox, anyone can tell me if I did it wrong?

Calling all students (18+) and recent graduates:

This summer, Bassam will be working on Tube as a visiting artist in BitFilms’ very cool new collaborative studio program. We are not yet legally allowed to reveal its site, so must offer only the clue that BitFilms exists “at the intersection of industry and academia”, somewhere in the midst of Amherst and Northampton (Massachusetts).

The BitFilms studio will host several interesting projects and a lot of talent, so although the internships are unpaid, it promises to be a very stimulating and fruitful space. Please note that since this was a sudden development, time is short to apply. Intern applications are due (via email) no later than Tuesday, 19 May at 5pm (EDT).

From the FAQ: Interns will get to work on cutting-edge non-commercial graphics and animation projects under the mentorship of professionals in the field. Interns will have access to a fully-equipped workstation and substantial computer animation production infrastructure. Interns will receive a signed, written evaluation from their supervisor(s) at the end of the internship period acknowledging their contributions, as well as a credit in each final production they worked on.

More information at BitFilms, internship link at top. Still have questions? Comment!

I’d like to switch to using video with the new <video> tag available in newer browsers, such as the firefox 3.5 series and safari (soon opera), because it will be easier for people to view the website (currently using flash) with free software, and because it will be the more web-standards way to go.
However, I think it’s still important to have a flash fallback in case of people using browsers not yet capable of the <video> tag: does anyone have advice/exprience about doing this in wordpress? as far as I know, there is no wordpress plugin capable of it, but it is probably possible without plugins.