Blender
Blender is a powerful tool for 3D drawing and animation. It is, in this sense, a Fourth Dimension application. Although it is not easy to master, it is accessible and with a few hours of study and practice can enable even a beginner to do some amazingly imaginative things. As with any skill mastery comes with practice and persistence. Blender opens to everyone enormous potential for creating wonderful messages from 15-30 second public service announcements to full length feature films.
The hardware requirement for Blender are both reasonable and accessible as it will rune on Windows, Mac and Linux Operating Systems. With the Linux OS there is a range of accessible hardware from the recycling community that is easily affordable. Even Windows systems on desktops and laptops that will run Blender adequately are within reach financially to most everyone.
I found Blender through a rather circuitous route. For several months I have been involved with the Minneapolis Telecommunications Network (MTN), which until July was operating three public access chaannels in the Minneapolis market. Public Access Channels are supported by funding the City receives from the Cable vendors who bring Cable TV into our homes. The two Minneapolis companies, Comcast and CenturyLink, are franchised or contracted to lay the cable on or under public property, namely our streets. Cable companies pay a fee to the city amounting to around $1.5 million annually. They also provide Public Access Channels for the city government, school system and the general public. MTN supported these channels with studio space, equipment and training. In July MTN lost its city funding and the channel support was shifted to another organization BFRESH.
My primary focus with MTN has been to foster educational uses of media for the essential communication to support all who seek to enhance their personal development (aka Learning … and I’ll write more on that curious turn of phrase in another blog). My personal development aspiration was to acquire skill with the editing software from Adobe, known as Premier, I found that character animation required the use of After Effects as companion to Premier also produced and sold by Adobe. Now Adobe no longer “sells” software, it rents it to you for a monthly/annual fee. Those fees add up to a few hundred dollars annually. I can’t justify that cost based on the essentially charitable work I try to do.
Consequently I started looking for alternatives. What I found was a very robust video editing software called OpenShot. OpenShot is open source, that is it is free as in free beer. Like Premier, OpenShot does not support creative titling and character animation directly but does provide a link with Blender.
Blender is amazing and I have made a commitment of time to develop at least a few rudimentary skills with the software. I am also looking for collaborators. Interested” Call me!