"Konstatin Dmitriev's Morevna Project is to 2-D animation what the Blender Foundation's Open movie projects have been for 3-D. The goal is to produce a production-quality, full-length animated feature, using only open source software, and license the source content and final product under free, re-use-friendly terms. Along the way, the work provides stress-testing, feedback, and development help to the open source software used, while raising awareness of the quality of the code.
"Despite the popularity of 3-D animated features churned out by Pixar and its competitors, 2-D animation is not a has-been style — particularly when you consider the wildly popular world of anime. Dmitriev is an anime fan as well as an animator and open source contributor, and in mid-2008 decided to combine his interests in one project. The first product was a brief short created entirely with the Synfig Studio animation package.
"Synfig Studio is an animation suite built for 2-D production. Like Blender, it was originally written in-house at a private animation studio as closed source software, but was later opened. Unlike traditional cell-based animation, in which each frame is individually drawn, Synfig uses vector graphics as its underlying elements. The animator needs only to draw key frames, and the software smoothly interpolates between them to create motion."
