A great new resource will soon be available!!

Like Studio Ghibli films and Futurama?  Ever wanted to create animations like them?  Well there's great news for animation enthusiasts, because it was recently announced that the software company Digital Video will release an open-source version of their software Toonz.  (It should be set for release on March 26.)  This new version of the software will have features developed by Studio Ghibli themselves, which will certainly be interesting to see how the animation process in the east differs from here in the west.  I've always had a fascination with Japanese-animated films like the works of Miyazaki and other Ghibli films, so I might give this a shot.

The company will still offer its Premium version of Toonz for animation studios at a competitive price, so whether or not the open source version will be drastically simplified is one of my main questions. It may not be a bigwig animation software like ToonBoom, but if you're at all interested in the anime and Ghibli animation style, definitely check it out.

The full story can be found right here on Digital Video's website.

Free plug-ins

Found some free, nifty plug-ins that might save people some time. The one that caught my eye was towards the bottom of the list, called Gridiron Software X-Factor, which can speed up your rendering time. If you have enough RAM for it. They also have a few good noise generators and simple effects if you're too lazy to make it yourself. They're worth a read and maybe a download to check them out.

The link can be found here

Stock Footage Resources

So I was looking around for sites that had free downloadable stock footage for the final project, and I came across this blog post that compiled a bunch of different sites that have different kinds of stock footage. While a lot of the sites this guy mentions sells their footage, there are a few on there (like Umesh and Stock Footage for Free) that have free downloads. Others send you free downloads occasionally if you register with them, which is pretty cool- so if you think you're going to need to buy stock footage in the future, I would go with one of the sites that sends weekly/monthly free clips to its users.

If you're willing to look through Umesh's blog, I think that could be your best bet (along with Stock Footage for Free and Internet Archives) if you want free stuff. I'm going to keep looking for other stock footage sites because I don't know quite yet what I need. I'm thinking about doing opening titles for Phantom of the Opera (the 2004 version), because they don't really have anything else other than the title appear before they go straight into the film.

Hope some of the links on the post help!