The Adventures of Boris Munchausen is an animated short created by the group of Russian kids under direction of open-source animation activist Konstantin Dmitriev.
The animation was created with a purpose to demonstrate what young generation can do with open-source tools utilizing the technologies developed by Morevna Project. In 2011 the animation was translated into English and released to the public together with its sources under Creative Commons BY-SA license.
Ok, after my previous post you probably believe that we are really exist and we really do working. To strengthen (or completely ruin?) your faith even more we are publishing development snapshot of second episode. This is a preview with draft voicing, no music and sound fx – of course this is a very early preview and it’s a sad look yet. But for the brave ones who are curious about the project status and not afraid of spoilers this might be interesting. Cheers!
You might be wondering why there is so few updates last time. The answer is simple – we are busy working hard on the project.
Today we want to introduce an opportunity to watch us working at the project in the studio via live webcam! So, here’s the announcement:
WE ARE BROADCASTING LIVE
every Monday and Friday
starting from 10:00 till 11:00 UTC
Watch us live here
(you can view broadcast archives when we are offline)
I don’t know how much it will be interesting for non-Russian speaking audience, but at least this is a good proof that we are real. ^_^
Saladin – the main antagonist of Munchausen series – turned to be the most difficult and discussed character for us. Here we would like to share all the different concept versions of his image:
…And here’s the final concept:
Hi! Finally, here’s the storyboard of upcoming episode 2.0. Enjoy!
I am happy to announce that we started to work on the second episode of The Adventures of Boris Munchausen. The screenplay is available here. Sorry, it’s in Russian only at the moment.
We plan to do screenplay translation via the Transifex service, but that requires some special preparations – please be patient. Also we want to put some efforts into development of tool that will allow us to automatically convert screenplay translations into subtitles for final movie. So, translating screenplay in your language you will get subtitles as well!
At this moment we already have storyboarding done. Now we need to scan it and bring into the order. Here’s a few unprocessed pages:
As for the first episode, the production will take 8 months – episode will be released in June 2012. This episode is estimated as at least twice complex than the first and we want to do our best. That’s why we also want to launch funding campaign, but before we should do necessary calculations.
The development process will be completely open. We will update our sources repository at regular basis, so anyone will be able to build and see the progress.
That’s it for today, stay tuned!
We are happy to release The Adventures of Boris Munchausen 1.01. This is a minor update to the first episode, containing some fixes to artwork. See revision history for the full list of changes.
Sources of The Adventures of Boris Munchausen are available at GitHub now!
Notice, that to build them you need the latest version of Remake – don’t hesitate to get the development git sources. I have provided brief instructions in the README file. Detailed instructions will follow soon.
We giving out all the sources, now it’s you to decide what to do with them. Here’s a few ideas/hints:
Have your own idea? Add it to the list here and inspire others!
Sources are provided under the Creative Commons License and you are free to modify, reuse, distribute and do other awesome things. See full license here. Notice, that all visual sources (artwork & animation) are licensed as CC BY, while some soundtrack music have CC BY-SA license. Thus, the final compilation (as a movie file) should be licensed as CC BY-SA.
What else can I say? Go ahead, rip it apart, people!
If you wondering about the amount of episodes planned in the story, here’s a little clarification. Initially screenplay was wrote as a solid composition. But later we have decided to split it into the following episodes:
Each episode could also have a set “subreleases”, introducing the improvements in the quality of art, animation or even the story flow. I.e. we may have 1.01, 1.02, 1.11 for first episode, 2.01, 2.02, 2.11 for second episode, and so on. The change in the minor number approximately reflects the amount of changes made.
