Open source and the Morevna project

“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.”

Complete Story