Using Blender for Patent Absurdity / advocacy animations
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Webber, Christopher Allan
Blender was used in the film Patent Absurdity to produce several animations. I will describe how those animations were made and talk about how Blender could be used for further free software / culture advocacy animation work.
 My name is Chris Weber. I work at Creative Commons and do a whole bunch of fun things, I think, generally. I'm here to talk about Blender, and there's not much time, so I'm just going to jump right into it. But it's specifically Blender for advocacy animation, and why I think it's so great. Oh, so I already said some of these things. I also have a website. I'm working on something called Community Goblin, which I'll talk about later. I like Blender. I make weird drawings. So Blender is a fully-featured 3D suite usable for modeling, texturing, rendering, animating, compositing, video editing, most 3D things, and then even have a game engine. But you can tell I stole this from my Python version of the talk. But anyway, it's also all free software, and it's under the GPL. You can do a lot of cool things with it. I was going to show a few couple of brief clips. I don't know how good of an idea this is, considering how much time we have. But this is a particularly cool one, and I hope it'll play the audio, but I'm not sure if it will. I don't think it is. Well, it's not as much fun with all the audio. I'm just going to skip ahead. Anyway, it's got this cool thing. There's this thing opening up. It's got this monster breaking out of it. Oh, there it is. It's got this monster breaking out of it. So I kind of skipped through that in the interest of time, but one of the cool things I think about Blender is that they have these DVDs that help you be able to learn how to do this kind of thing. And this is one example with Preacher Fast 3, which basically is a tutorial by the guy who created that film, and he set up the 40 hours that he took to make the film and showed you how to do it. So I think if you're wanting to get into Blender, it's a Blender science. It's a Blender Institute training DVDs are a great way to go, especially Creacher Factory and Venom's Lab and stuff. And now, OK, so now let me jump into Blender itself by jumping into psycho.blend. This is a little guy I created. He's somewhere on my website that I don't remember where I linked to. And I'm just going to show a few basic things about Blender because I think people tend to get overwhelmed when they first use it. So first of all, you should know that Blender is a very splitable application. You can split things, make sections for whatever type of thing that it is that you need at the time, and you should really operate Blender as if you're playing a first person tutor. You use one left hand, you leave your left hand for the keyboard and your right hand for the mouse, and this allows you to do things super quickly. In fact, I'm going to show off one thing which is pretty cool. I'm going to show off a couple things. First of all, I guess I'll get into modeling in Blender just as a quick example. Things are based off of vertices, faces, and edges and stuff like that. You don't have too much time to get into it, but here's just a quick example of me taking this guy and giving him horn. Pretty cool. If I had Mirror modifier on and we show up on the other end, but I don't, I'll reload the file, and I'll show off the animation. So you can modify methods, you can rig them up so that you can mess around with them. So this guy's all rigged up. You see he's got a skeleton. I can grab onto this thing over here and move it around and this thing over here, and I can also go and grab onto his legs and start moving those around and stuff like that. And if I want, I can even grab onto this thing and start making him look around. So animation. What is animation in Blender? Since I'm talking about animations, I should probably show you. It's actually not too complicated. The basic ideas are that you're just inserting keyframes. So let's assume I'm going to move the following things around. I'm going to move this. I am selecting the wrong thing. And we'll grab his feet. Damn it. He's accidentally selecting that thing and it's making it my life difficult. So I'm just going to insert these one by one. So I'm being stupid. Oh, I just used the record thing. Okay, insert location. So now I've inserted the location of these two things. I'll move them up and actually move this forward a little bit and insert the location again. And what did I do wrong? What? That's impossible. That's impossible. Wow, I'm not bringing this talk off to you. It's awesome over the third as I thought I was going to. I don't know why my animation tools are not working right and that's because I'm in the mesh. Sorry. I am going to restart this. Grab onto this. Insert it. Move it up. Switch to the timeline. Move it up again. And now it moves back and forth. So this is the basic idea of animation is that you end up taking some property, you end up moving forward in time or something like that, and you enter the key form and frame it at another point. So in this example, I'm just moving around these wings and now he's starting to fly. I could also move around his eyes via this control way that I have here, but I seem to also still be having trouble selecting things and in the interest of time, I'm not going to do it anymore. So bye, Psycho. I just wonder, I am not thinking during this presentation today. I'm sorry. Okay, moving on to other things. We still don't have much time. About the animation, about advocacy animations in particular, and also the patent absurdity stuff that I worked on. So I did some animations with the pre-saltor foundation on a film called Patent Absurdity. And I actually really wanted to put this idea for a while that we should be able to try to take animation and use it as a form to help people understand things better. And this came up through an opportunity. They were already working on this film, so I decided to do it as a holder for a band. So here's an example of talking about kind of a field of task. Patent Absurdity is like a law that was forced to set up patent and fill out. They had to patent it, but for the intelligence they had to trade with the companies that had patents. And so the arsenal started developing. And by the year 2000, 2001, Microsoft now holds thousands of software patents. Oracle was probably approaching a thousand software patents, Adobe. And all of them have become more and more aggressive. Patent is, and some of the ones who were against software patents ended up doing other companies. And so what you had is an explosion of patent things first, and then an explosion of litigation. Anyway, so this is, I thought, this seems to go really well over with people who end up watching the film. I think that animation's do a great job of being able to take something and really kind of opening up the space for it. So I'm just going to talk about some of the animations I did with the film. I did that. I also just did some really stupid graph animation, which was just kind of in here first throughout the film while they were talking about the actual buildup of patents. At the end of the film, actually Richard Stallman had been talking about earlier in the film that there was this idea that what would happen if, you know, Faith Hylven had been, if there were these musical idea patents and stuff like that. And so he, and that he probably wouldn't have been able to invent it, the stuff that he was doing. So for the finale of the film, you decided to do this. So that was pretty much that. There was also this really boring timeline thing that, we just kind of flipped through these different types of things that they were going along. And so I'm going to walk through these different sections of these animations I did and show you basically how to reproduce them. The first one is the timeline animation, which is that one I showed. We basically had a whole bunch of, we were kind of trying to show the timeline of patent information as it was going through. And so we, what we did was we took the, we created a bunch of templates inside of inkscape that were, and I should have been smart enough, an inkscape first, that were basically the different images that were on this timeline. So if I render here, you should see this one starting to appear in the view. So this is a pretty good example of how to start getting a really easy example of how an animation is done. You can see all these keyframes over here. To be able to do the timeline animation, all we really basically had to do was take an image, which is what each one of these things is. It's just a simple plane with an image mapped onto it. We had a camera and we just moved the camera down from one item to another. And so you can see that happening here with the camera moving down if I move along the timeline. But there's also one other thing that was being animated. And I think this is one of the exciting things about Blender 2.5 is that everything is in theory animatable. And actually that's what we did here with this item. I think it should be on texture. So you can see this property right here, which says it's the alpha, which is the transparency. And so as we move between these two sections, you see the alpha moving from 0 to 1. So that's because you can just hover over a property. For example, the alpha just inserted at some point, moved to another point, and inserted at the next value that you wanted at. And Blender will handle that animation for you. So that's an example of a really super simple animation that we did that was really stupidly simple and easy. And I think hopefully fairly easy to describe. So, yes, the graph animation. So we extracted a bunch of stuff from Inkscape. We actually opened up, I was given a PDF full of graphs to use. So we just opened it up in Inkscape and just started messing around with breaking up the tasks individually, which was really painful, moved them onto separate layers, and then just animated those layers moving out of place. Let me pull open the graph animation. There's a simple version of this, and then there's a scary version of this. So the first graph that we did was just actually a graph moving into, slowly becomes visible. Well, this is kind of me being smart and happy. If you see the line becomes visible, I was really lazy and thought that Blender would be really easy to use for this, and it was pretty easy. But what I'm actually doing here is something semi-evil. This is actually the image itself that we were making, and I was actually just, what I did, I said Blender has a whole bunch of video editing tools and other things like that. It also has a compositor with node editing. So in the node editor, I just ended up setting an image on the background layer. You can set an image on this like that. I'm not sure how to make it visible right now. And then I actually just set this thing, which is a plane, just actually in the compositor. Man, I'm not able to describe this at all at all. Just kind of blocks out the view as it goes through. You can do a smart thing with nodes to be able to control the alpha of certain layers and stuff like that to be able to make something fully visible. Let me close it. And then there's the ending beta open animation, which is pretty much the same idea as the other timeline thing, but just slightly more complicated. What we did was you can see there's all these different layers here. And each one of these layers, these things, this would be a lot better if I had shader support on here because then you could actually see the images. The camera actually just moves along from each one of these to the next. So if we move to the camera view, you can see ourselves moving from image to image and then slowly dropping off the page. So you can see this move away, this move forward. And actually maybe it might be a bit easier if you look at it from this perspective. So here's the planes down here and the camera up here, if I press animate, to start going through the animation. Oh, it's going super slow. But you should be able to see it happen. So it moves along taking a long time. You can see one of these planes basically drop and move down. And so that's all we were doing was actually just moving a bunch of planes around with images mapped on them and controlling their transparency as to whether or not they came into view. And that's all there was to it. But these are kind of boring actually. The thing that everybody wants to know about is the Wargames animation. I showed the other ones first to show just basic simple animation properties. But here's I think what everybody wants to see. This was actually kind of completely evil. So we have the image on the background which was done with Inkscape. And we have this moving along. You can see in this example here, I really should have split these out better before I started doing this. You can see this line basically grow. Now the problem was that when we entered it actually doing this animation, there was about like 10 million different lines actually coming in at one time. The way that we ended up controlling the visibility of this line here is something that I learned from my friend Bafam, which is you actually use a curve to control the thickness of another curve. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get that in time. So the interesting thing is that we actually use the Python API to control each one of these curves. You can actually select a curve and you can put particular properties on objects. So I would actually just add a custom property to each one of these curves that I was working on saying what the end frame was, what the start frame was and everything like that. And just use the Python API to enable transforming it into a curve. So this is what, yeah, so I wrote a Python script called MucifyCurve. What Python scripting actually looks like in Blender is something like this. If you want to add a monkey, for example, you can go to add mesh monkey. Now you've got a monkey. If you want to do that via a script, you can actually just go to the info box, add a monkey, and it will actually say over here the Python equivalent for adding that monkey and also spruing up my rendering in the process of trying to copy it. That's a stupid and tell bug that keeps annoying me. But now I can reproduce that by doing, cpi.opt.mesh.Munkey. Yeah, I should add a second monkey right here. So what I did actually to be able to create all these curves, I just figured out the procedure for adding each one of them by hand, which was I added a curve and then I would add another curve that controlled the thickness of that curve. I knew that I wanted an explosion at the end. And so it actually just the properties of the radius of the explosion. I would set the template for the curve that controlled the other curve. And then I would just move that along. And so the script would actually just take the properties that they are on there and make them all visible. What's up? 10 minutes? Oh, man. Okay. So, Creative Commons Animation Films. This is one thing I wanted to show real quickly. I guess, I think that there's an opportunity to actually be able to show and get people excited about ideas and always feel by actually moving through. This is an animation that actually got me fairly excited about Creative Commons while I was in college. And now I'm looking for ideas. But the ideas of it, this makes me really clear. I've been really stumbling through this entire talk and I have no idea why when I gave this an awesome presentation last night at the Python Music Group. But what I'm trying to drive home is that there's a space that's open when you end up having animations and having things like this. We have some ideas like the free software definition has been around for over 20 years, but almost nobody is able to understand what the free software definition is unless it's their DPM grade and free software. Could we end up getting the general ideas of stuff like the free software definition out to people by having some sort of more abstracted explanation of it? I think so, and I'd really like to see this type of stuff done. But I have pretty much completely run out of time. So, if you have any questions, look down. Questions, anyone? I'm still having trouble understanding that the curve controlling another curve. So, the animation with the patent warfare one, you said like you had one curve and then you had another curve? Oh, okay. So, I wasn't sure how well it would get into this because I think it tends to really confuse everyone, including myself. So, let's see if I can find the layer that this is on. So, here it is. You'll see as I move throughout time here that this, it's not that one. This one and this one. Nope, nope. There it is. So, you'll see as I move throughout time that this curve and this curve that I'm moving about, this curve as this one moves along, it's actually extending the other one. And the way that this works, I can remove this empty here real quick. And these points are actually, will actually just control the entire width of the curve. So, you can do really clever and evil things like sublide. And you can see this part of the curve is getting really thick at that edge. It might be more obvious if I make it like that. So, the evil thing that I actually did to just control the visibility of the curve was I just set up a, I set up this curve to control the other curve and I actually just set it basically between one and zero at the point at which I actually wanted it to be visible and I set up a hook between those other two points which was the empty that you saw in the middle. And that's this thing. So, as I move this back and forth, it moves those other two points. So, this thing is controlling the two vertices in the middle. And so, the animation is actually just moving things from this point to this point. So, it's a clever evil machine to be able to control the visibility of the curve. I actually just animated basically my strip would insert this thing here and then it would insert this thing here and then back and forth on the timeline, it would just move it. And to be able to create the bombs, I would just insert a sphere at that point and just move it up and stuff like that. You may want to play with this on the other machines on the side. Blender's been installed there. I'm trying to get more users on those Blenders. Any other questions? That little guy with the wings at the beginning, if you have not already, would you be willing to upload him to OGA because I'm sure he would go great in some games? He's actually been on my task list to upload to OpenGamer. If you don't know what OpenGamer is, Bart runs a wonderful fight for game stuff. I think he's talking on a panel. But anyway, yeah, I'd be willing to upload it. I really should and I will soon. Well, one follow-up. Do you have a general tutorial anywhere about how you made him? I don't have a tutorial. I can make one. Really, it's just kind of box modeling like this, where you split things so you start making the shape. And then I might take this birdsy here, extract, extrude, move it in, extrude it here. And now we have kind of an eye hole on this side of the face and stuff like that. So really, just box modeling. It should be an edge modeling. I just take kind of a general shape and I just keep splitting it down and adjusting the properties until I get to that point. But I think there's a much better example of how to do this kind of modeling than I can have, and that's to watch the Creature Factory DVD or the Venom's Lab DVDs that the Blender Institute puts out because they're creative commons license and you could actually watch them without having to pay for them. But anyway, but if you do a really good job of explaining like basic modeling techniques and stuff like that. Cool, thank you. I'm curious, what was the production process for the animations in the movie? Did you collaborate with people? Did you have a graphic designer? So there was the director of the film, Luca Gattani. Basically, we talked about the type of animations that we wanted from the beginning, and then they decided they wanted the War Games one, and then a couple days before we released the thing, they decided they wanted a finale to the film and wanted the Beethoven thing. But actually, that was kind of fun because I was given a lot of control on how to do the nuke scene basically. They just told me to do basically whatever you need. So, in terms of the timeline animation, I was given a file that the Free Software Foundation worked with one of their patent expert people, and he basically gave me a history that I should convey through the file. And I just opened it up and made a bunch of templates, put them in that file, and animated it. And with the Beethoven thing, actually, the director's friend, I think, made a MIDI file. He didn't actually give me the MIDI file to play with. Then they gave me a bunch of SVG files that I could open up in in-state that had all the notes and everything like that. They broke it up into image layers for me, and they told me, make this disappear at this point, and this point, and this point, because I don't know crap about music. So I was just able to animate stuff to, I was just able to list up the timings that they had written in that file, and they should just do that. But I think part of the film was still that, the nuke thing anyway. And that was like, hey, we really need this cool nuke display thing, and I just figured that out. Thank you. Thank you.
 My name is Chris Weber.  I work at Creative Commons and do a whole bunch of fun things,  I think, generally.  I'm here to talk about Blender, and there's not much time,  so I'm just going to jump right into it.  But it's specifically Blender for advocacy animation,  and why I think it's so great.  Oh, so I already said some of these things.  I also have a website.  I'm working on something called Community Goblin,  which I'll talk about later.  I like Blender.  I make weird drawings.  So Blender is a fully-featured 3D suite  usable for modeling, texturing, rendering, animating,  compositing, video editing, most 3D things,  and then even have a game engine.  But you can tell I stole this from my Python version  of the talk.  But anyway, it's also all free software,  and it's under the GPL.  You can do a lot of cool things with it.  I was going to show a few couple of brief clips.  I don't know how good of an idea this is,  considering how much time we have.  But this is a particularly cool one,  and I hope it'll play the audio, but I'm not sure if it will.  I don't think it is.  Well, it's not as much fun with all the audio.  I'm just going to skip ahead.  Anyway, it's got this cool thing.  There's this thing opening up.  It's got this monster breaking out of it.  Oh, there it is.  It's got this monster breaking out of it.  So I kind of skipped through that in the interest of time,  but one of the cool things I think about Blender  is that they have these DVDs that help you be able to learn  how to do this kind of thing.  And this is one example with Preacher Fast 3,  which basically is a tutorial by the guy who created that film,  and he set up the 40 hours that he took to make the film  and showed you how to do it.  So I think if you're wanting to get into Blender,  it's a Blender science.  It's a Blender Institute training DVDs are a great way to go,  especially Creacher Factory and Venom's Lab and stuff.  And now, OK, so now let me jump into Blender itself  by jumping into psycho.blend.  This is a little guy I created.  He's somewhere on my website that I don't remember where I linked to.  And I'm just going to show a few basic things about Blender  because I think people tend to get overwhelmed when they first use it.  So first of all, you should know that Blender is a very splitable application.  You can split things, make sections for whatever type of thing that it is  that you need at the time,  and you should really operate Blender as if you're playing a first person tutor.  You use one left hand,  you leave your left hand for the keyboard and your right hand for the mouse,  and this allows you to do things super quickly.  In fact, I'm going to show off one thing which is pretty cool.  I'm going to show off a couple things.  First of all, I guess I'll get into modeling in Blender just as a quick example.  Things are based off of vertices, faces, and edges and stuff like that.  You don't have too much time to get into it,  but here's just a quick example of me taking this guy and giving him horn.  Pretty cool. If I had Mirror modifier on and we show up on the other end, but I don't,  I'll reload the file,  and I'll show off the animation.  So you can modify methods, you can rig them up so that you can mess around with them.  So this guy's all rigged up. You see he's got a skeleton.  I can grab onto this thing over here and move it around and this thing over here,  and I can also go and grab onto his legs and start moving those around and stuff like that.  And if I want, I can even grab onto this thing and start making him look around.  So animation. What is animation in Blender?  Since I'm talking about animations, I should probably show you.  It's actually not too complicated.  The basic ideas are that you're just inserting keyframes.  So let's assume I'm going to move the following things around.  I'm going to move this.  I am selecting the wrong thing.  And we'll grab his feet. Damn it.  He's accidentally selecting that thing and it's making it my life difficult.  So I'm just going to insert these one by one.  So I'm being stupid. Oh, I just used the record thing.  Okay, insert location.  So now I've inserted the location of these two things.  I'll move them up and actually move this forward a little bit and insert the location again.  And what did I do wrong?  What? That's impossible.  That's impossible.  Wow, I'm not bringing this talk off to you.  It's awesome over the third as I thought I was going to.  I don't know why my animation tools are not working right and that's because I'm in the mesh.  Sorry.  I am going to restart this.  Grab onto this.  Insert it.  Move it up.  Switch to the timeline.  Move it up again.  And now it moves back and forth.  So this is the basic idea of animation is that you end up taking some property,  you end up moving forward in time or something like that,  and you enter the key form and frame it at another point.  So in this example, I'm just moving around these wings and now he's starting to fly.  I could also move around his eyes via this control way that I have here,  but I seem to also still be having trouble selecting things and in the interest of time,  I'm not going to do it anymore.  So bye, Psycho.  I just wonder, I am not thinking during this presentation today.  I'm sorry.  Okay, moving on to other things.  We still don't have much time.  About the animation, about advocacy animations in particular,  and also the patent absurdity stuff that I worked on.  So I did some animations with the pre-saltor foundation on a film called Patent Absurdity.  And I actually really wanted to put this idea for a while  that we should be able to try to take animation and use it as a form  to help people understand things better.  And this came up through an opportunity.  They were already working on this film, so I decided to do it  as a holder for a band.  So here's an example of talking about kind of a field of task.  Patent Absurdity is like a law that was forced to set up patent and fill out.  They had to patent it, but for the intelligence they had to trade with the companies that had patents.  And so the arsenal started developing.  And by the year 2000, 2001, Microsoft now holds thousands of software patents.  Oracle was probably approaching a thousand software patents, Adobe.  And all of them have become more and more aggressive.  Patent is, and some of the ones who were against software patents ended up doing other companies.  And so what you had is an explosion of patent things first, and then an explosion of litigation.  Anyway, so this is, I thought, this seems to go really well over with people who end up watching the film.  I think that animation's do a great job of being able to take something  and really kind of opening up the space for it.  So I'm just going to talk about some of the animations I did with the film.  I did that. I also just did some really stupid graph animation, which was just kind of in here first throughout the film  while they were talking about the actual buildup of patents.  At the end of the film, actually Richard Stallman had been talking about earlier in the film  that there was this idea that what would happen if, you know,  Faith Hylven had been, if there were these musical idea patents and stuff like that.  And so he, and that he probably wouldn't have been able to invent it, the stuff that he was doing.  So for the finale of the film, you decided to do this.  So that was pretty much that.  There was also this really boring timeline thing that,  we just kind of flipped through these different types of things that they were going along.  And so I'm going to walk through these different sections of these animations I did  and show you basically how to reproduce them.  The first one is the timeline animation, which is that one I showed.  We basically had a whole bunch of, we were kind of trying to show the timeline of patent information as it was going through.  And so we, what we did was we took the, we created a bunch of templates inside of inkscape that were,  and I should have been smart enough, an inkscape first,  that were basically the different images that were on this timeline.  So if I render here, you should see this one starting to appear in the view.  So this is a pretty good example of how to start getting a really easy example of how an animation is done.  You can see all these keyframes over here.  To be able to do the timeline animation, all we really basically had to do was take an image,  which is what each one of these things is.  It's just a simple plane with an image mapped onto it.  We had a camera and we just moved the camera down from one item to another.  And so you can see that happening here with the camera moving down if I move along the timeline.  But there's also one other thing that was being animated.  And I think this is one of the exciting things about Blender 2.5 is that everything is in theory animatable.  And actually that's what we did here with this item.  I think it should be on texture.  So you can see this property right here, which says it's the alpha, which is the transparency.  And so as we move between these two sections, you see the alpha moving from 0 to 1.  So that's because you can just hover over a property.  For example, the alpha just inserted at some point, moved to another point,  and inserted at the next value that you wanted at.  And Blender will handle that animation for you.  So that's an example of a really super simple animation that we did that was really stupidly simple and easy.  And I think hopefully fairly easy to describe.  So, yes, the graph animation.  So we extracted a bunch of stuff from Inkscape.  We actually opened up, I was given a PDF full of graphs to use.  So we just opened it up in Inkscape and just started messing around with breaking up the tasks individually,  which was really painful, moved them onto separate layers, and then just animated those layers moving out of place.  Let me pull open the graph animation.  There's a simple version of this, and then there's a scary version of this.  So the first graph that we did was just actually a graph moving into, slowly becomes visible.  Well, this is kind of me being smart and happy.  If you see the line becomes visible, I was really lazy and thought that Blender would be really easy to use for this,  and it was pretty easy.  But what I'm actually doing here is something semi-evil.  This is actually the image itself that we were making, and I was actually just,  what I did, I said Blender has a whole bunch of video editing tools and other things like that.  It also has a compositor with node editing.  So in the node editor, I just ended up setting an image on the background layer.  You can set an image on this like that.  I'm not sure how to make it visible right now.  And then I actually just set this thing, which is a plane, just actually in the compositor.  Man, I'm not able to describe this at all at all.  Just kind of blocks out the view as it goes through.  You can do a smart thing with nodes to be able to control the alpha of certain layers and stuff like that  to be able to make something fully visible.  Let me close it.  And then there's the ending beta open animation, which is pretty much the same idea as the other timeline thing,  but just slightly more complicated.  What we did was you can see there's all these different layers here.  And each one of these layers, these things, this would be a lot better if I had shader support on here  because then you could actually see the images.  The camera actually just moves along from each one of these to the next.  So if we move to the camera view, you can see ourselves moving from image to image  and then slowly dropping off the page.  So you can see this move away, this move forward.  And actually maybe it might be a bit easier if you look at it from this perspective.  So here's the planes down here and the camera up here, if I press animate,  to start going through the animation.  Oh, it's going super slow.  But you should be able to see it happen.  So it moves along taking a long time.  You can see one of these planes basically drop and move down.  And so that's all we were doing was actually just moving a bunch of planes around with images  mapped on them and controlling their transparency as to whether or not they came into view.  And that's all there was to it.  But these are kind of boring actually.  The thing that everybody wants to know about is the Wargames animation.  I showed the other ones first to show just basic simple animation properties.  But here's I think what everybody wants to see.  This was actually kind of completely evil.  So we have the image on the background which was done with Inkscape.  And we have this moving along.  You can see in this example here, I really should have split these out better before I started doing this.  You can see this line basically grow.  Now the problem was that when we entered it actually doing this animation,  there was about like 10 million different lines actually coming in at one time.  The way that we ended up controlling the visibility of this line here is something that I learned from my friend Bafam,  which is you actually use a curve to control the thickness of another curve.  I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get that in time.  So the interesting thing is that we actually use the Python API to control each one of these curves.  You can actually select a curve and you can put particular properties on objects.  So I would actually just add a custom property to each one of these curves that I was working on saying what the end frame was,  what the start frame was and everything like that.  And just use the Python API to enable transforming it into a curve.  So this is what, yeah, so I wrote a Python script called MucifyCurve.  What Python scripting actually looks like in Blender is something like this.  If you want to add a monkey, for example, you can go to add mesh monkey.  Now you've got a monkey.  If you want to do that via a script, you can actually just go to the info box, add a monkey,  and it will actually say over here the Python equivalent for adding that monkey  and also spruing up my rendering in the process of trying to copy it.  That's a stupid and tell bug that keeps annoying me.  But now I can reproduce that by doing, cpi.opt.mesh.Munkey.  Yeah, I should add a second monkey right here.  So what I did actually to be able to create all these curves,  I just figured out the procedure for adding each one of them by hand, which was I added a curve  and then I would add another curve that controlled the thickness of that curve.  I knew that I wanted an explosion at the end.  And so it actually just the properties of the radius of the explosion.  I would set the template for the curve that controlled the other curve.  And then I would just move that along.  And so the script would actually just take the properties that they are on there  and make them all visible.  What's up? 10 minutes? Oh, man. Okay.  So, Creative Commons Animation Films.  This is one thing I wanted to show real quickly.  I guess, I think that there's an opportunity to actually be able to show and get people excited about ideas  and always feel by actually moving through.  This is an animation that actually got me fairly excited about Creative Commons while I was in college.  And now I'm looking for ideas.  But the ideas of it, this makes me really clear.  I've been really stumbling through this entire talk and I have no idea why  when I gave this an awesome presentation last night at the Python Music Group.  But what I'm trying to drive home is that there's a space that's open when you end up having animations  and having things like this.  We have some ideas like the free software definition has been around for over 20 years,  but almost nobody is able to understand what the free software definition is  unless it's their DPM grade and free software.  Could we end up getting the general ideas of stuff like the free software definition  out to people by having some sort of more abstracted explanation of it?  I think so, and I'd really like to see this type of stuff done.  But I have pretty much completely run out of time.  So, if you have any questions, look down.  Questions, anyone?  I'm still having trouble understanding that the curve controlling another curve.  So, the animation with the patent warfare one, you said like you had one curve  and then you had another curve?  Oh, okay.  So, I wasn't sure how well it would get into this because I think it tends to really confuse everyone,  including myself.  So, let's see if I can find the layer that this is on.  So, here it is.  You'll see as I move throughout time here that this, it's not that one.  This one and this one.  Nope, nope.  There it is.  So, you'll see as I move throughout time that this curve and this curve that I'm moving about,  this curve as this one moves along, it's actually extending the other one.  And the way that this works, I can remove this empty here real quick.  And these points are actually, will actually just control the entire width of the curve.  So, you can do really clever and evil things like sublide.  And you can see this part of the curve is getting really thick at that edge.  It might be more obvious if I make it like that.  So, the evil thing that I actually did to just control the visibility of the curve was I just set up a,  I set up this curve to control the other curve and I actually just set it basically between one and zero  at the point at which I actually wanted it to be visible and I set up a hook between those other two points  which was the empty that you saw in the middle.  And that's this thing.  So, as I move this back and forth, it moves those other two points.  So, this thing is controlling the two vertices in the middle.  And so, the animation is actually just moving things from this point to this point.  So, it's a clever evil machine to be able to control the visibility of the curve.  I actually just animated basically my strip would insert this thing here and then it would insert this thing here  and then back and forth on the timeline, it would just move it.  And to be able to create the bombs, I would just insert a sphere at that point and just move it up and stuff like that.  You may want to play with this on the other machines on the side.  Blender's been installed there.  I'm trying to get more users on those Blenders.  Any other questions?  That little guy with the wings at the beginning, if you have not already,  would you be willing to upload him to OGA because I'm sure he would go great in some games?  He's actually been on my task list to upload to OpenGamer.  If you don't know what OpenGamer is, Bart runs a wonderful fight for game stuff.  I think he's talking on a panel.  But anyway, yeah, I'd be willing to upload it.  I really should and I will soon.  Well, one follow-up.  Do you have a general tutorial anywhere about how you made him?  I don't have a tutorial.  I can make one.  Really, it's just kind of box modeling like this, where you split things so you start making the shape.  And then I might take this birdsy here, extract, extrude, move it in, extrude it here.  And now we have kind of an eye hole on this side of the face and stuff like that.  So really, just box modeling.  It should be an edge modeling.  I just take kind of a general shape and I just keep splitting it down and adjusting the properties until I get to that point.  But I think there's a much better example of how to do this kind of modeling than I can have,  and that's to watch the Creature Factory DVD or the Venom's Lab DVDs that the Blender Institute puts out  because they're creative commons license and you could actually watch them without having to pay for them.  But anyway, but if you do a really good job of explaining like basic modeling techniques and stuff like that.  Cool, thank you.  I'm curious, what was the production process for the animations in the movie?  Did you collaborate with people?  Did you have a graphic designer?  So there was the director of the film, Luca Gattani.  Basically, we talked about the type of animations that we wanted from the beginning,  and then they decided they wanted the War Games one, and then a couple days before we released the thing,  they decided they wanted a finale to the film and wanted the Beethoven thing.  But actually, that was kind of fun because I was given a lot of control on how to do the nuke scene basically.  They just told me to do basically whatever you need.  So, in terms of the timeline animation, I was given a file that the Free Software Foundation worked with one of their patent expert people,  and he basically gave me a history that I should convey through the file.  And I just opened it up and made a bunch of templates, put them in that file, and animated it.  And with the Beethoven thing, actually, the director's friend, I think, made a MIDI file.  He didn't actually give me the MIDI file to play with.  Then they gave me a bunch of SVG files that I could open up in in-state that had all the notes and everything like that.  They broke it up into image layers for me, and they told me,  make this disappear at this point, and this point, and this point, because I don't know crap about music.  So I was just able to animate stuff to, I was just able to list up the timings that they had written in that file,  and they should just do that.  But I think part of the film was still that, the nuke thing anyway.  And that was like, hey, we really need this cool nuke display thing, and I just figured that out.  Thank you.  Thank you.
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