Adobe Offsetting: April 2014
This will be a short and sweet post for this month’s Adobe Offsetting. For the second month in a row, I decided to back Project Gooseberry for Blender.
Repeat performance
There are many reasons why I decided to donate for a second month in a row. Over the past weeks, I’ve been spending any possible spare moment learning Blender. Blender’s a wonderful 3D modeler, animation tool, video editor and compositor all rolled into one piece of software. With so many functions comes with an equal amount of buttons and windows. Numerous buttons and windows tend to make me hyperventilate.
Great teachers
So far, I’ve had a great, non-hyperventilating learning experience with Blender. Part of that comes from great software but also comes from having a great teacher. I’ve been taking the Tufts online Blender course, taught by Neal Hirsig. Neal’s teaching style is flawless. He has a wonderful way of taking you through a process while learning and reinforcing the quick key commands and interface navigation. The projects are basic, but that’s what I like about it. You can focus less on what you’re making and more using the program.
Donations and more donations
Last month I donated $25.60 to the Gooseberry Project for the film download. I like the idea of the making of film that’s completely open. With only six major media companies in the US, there’s more of a need than ever for new voices. To think that only six companies decide what media we consume as Americans is kind of scary. With companies that large, it’s difficult to create new competition, a modern day David and Goliath.
By making a feature-length film with Blender, their founder Ton Roosendaal hopes to push the software to its limits , exposing areas for growth and change. Similar to proprietary software counterparts that companies like Disney use, putting Blender to the test by creating something grand in scope will give engineers and artists a chance to improve on the workflow and design of an already impressive tool.
I donated $57.60 this month for access to the Blender Cloud. I wanted to help Blender and Project Gooseberry to their goal of 3,000 supporters by this Saturday. It’s an added bonus to have access to all of the projects assets and super informative tutorials.
On Friday I was glad to see that they reached the goal and the video below that they posted. Here’s to another month of raising money and I hope that they reach their 500,000 goal.
