Apertus November Newsletter
Sasha
Apertus November 2012 Newsletter
Greetings and welcome to another round-up of all Apertus related updates. This edition brings us news on multiple fronts, so sit down, get comfortable and enjoy all the amazing developments that are happening in our community.
VANITAS: The First Apertus Feature Film with Axiom?
Artist and Filmmaker Oscar Spierenburg founded the Apertus project a little more than 6 years ago with the vision of one day shooting a feature film with his own custom camera. Now he has finished the script for his début feature film, a Belgian and UK co-production titled Vanitas.
With Axiom on the horizon, Oscar’s initial dream for Apertus is nearing fruition. We’ve created a blog for Vanitas, explaining the film’s story, introducing you to the crew behind the film, and giving you a chance to stay up to date with the progress of the production. This blog is located at the following URL: vanitas.apertus.org
Hollywood <3 Open Source Project
Apertus project members Carlos Padial, Simón Vialás Fernández, Cédric Demiddeleer and Philippe Jadin held an interview with Ton Roosendaal (Founder of Blender as open source software and initiator/producer of the Open Movie Projects).
As part of the "Hollywood <3 Open Source" documentary film project, a small Apertus team landed in Amsterdam to shoot an interview with Ton Roosendaal. We ended up having a great discussion with Ton, who was very helpful and friendly during a day that was packed with appointments coinciding with the end of the annual Blender conference.
During the interview, we discussed Ton’s story, the history of Blender, the future of open source, the positive implications for this, open source in Hollywood and the use of licences, etc... To quote a member of our film crew, “We can learn from Ton. I don't want to summarize badly what he told us, but what I understood that day is that open source can be a pragmatic, successful and lasting choice. That a no-compromise approach to open source might be the "right thing". Blender’s future was once compromised by it’s founding company filing for bankruptcy. Open source licensing and crowd-funding saved Blender’s source code from disappearing, and introduced a future-proof piece of software that everyone can now rely on.
A series of clips from the interview can be accessed via the following thread on our forums:
http://www.apertus.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=778
We're already planning a second shoot led by Philippe when we attend 'how-do-you-do':
http://howdoyoudo.creativemediadays.be/speaker/apertus
The list of speakers who will be presenting here can be seen at the following URL:
http://howdoyoudo.creativemediadays.be/speakers
Elphel developing model NC393 Camera
After a three year temporary diversion, Elphel Inc. have announced plans for a new camera design: the Elphel 393. This model will have significantly higher performance than the 353 and will inherit the openness and flexibility from its predecessors. With the ability to group multiple boards together, Elphel is pursuing the development of a Heptaclops camera, a multi-sensor device which will be suitable for 3D scene reconstruction and synthetic bokeh generation amongst many other applications. An interactive HTML5 demo of this has been developed by Elphel Inc. and can be accessed here: http://community.elphel.com/files/phg3/index.php
Andrey Filippov has revealed that ‘(Elphel) decided to drop the idea of building the already designed and prototyped model NC373 camera. While the next camera will share some parts with the 373, the changes are too big to call it just a revision “C” of the 10373 system board, so it will be model NC393. The camera system board will have Xilinx Zynq that combines FPGA and a dual-core ARM processor on a same chip...’
Aligned three camera setup (Heptaclops uses a similar setup with 7 cameras)
Model NC393 CAD rendering with M12 (S-mount) lens and thermally compensated sensor front end
Andrey further states that ‘Elphel does not take orders on the custom design, but rather we try to do our best in making sure our users can do the customization themselves.’
The official blog post explaining this in much greater detail can be found here:
http://blog.elphel.com/2012/10/heptaclops-camera-and-the-393/
Floresta Vermelha Crowdfunding begins
Crowd funding for Brazilian Apertus/Elphel shot short film "Red Forest" has started: http://catarse.me/en/florestavermelha
The team is looking to raise $3000. Please participate and assist the first narrative-based Apertus film in becoming a great success! Here is a teaser for the plot’s synopsis:
Nikolai expects to be part of the family again by the end of the day. But what does “being accepted” mean in a place where the forest shines red in the dark?
By backing the project, you can receive rewards including a copy of the film on DVD, posters, soundtrack CDs and tickets to the premiere.
The movie has been shot over the last two weekends and is currently in a post-production phase. It will be released on November the 30th. Below, you can see photos from the production, taken by Ana Rezende.
(Apertus atttending) How Do You Do
Grab a chair and join Apertus for the next edition of 'How Do You Do'. This is an international event where more than 40 ‘digital heroes’ and (young) innovators exchange ideas and practices in an informal get-together in Ghent, Belgium.
‘How Do You Do’ will feature 10 round tables hosting 60 talks, focusing on current themes like transmedia, gaming, film, art, business development, creative coding and more. Entrance is free, but please register! Further information regarding this event can be accessed here:
http://howdoyoudo.creativemediadays.be/
The Creation of Apertus Association
On Thursday 18th October, members of the newly formed Apertus Association met up on IRC Freenode (channel #Apertus) and held an election for the positions of Chairman, Vice Chairman and two Interim Advisory Board Council Members that run the Apertus Association. Congratulations to Sebastian Pichelhofer for being elected as Chairman, Oscar Spierenburg for Vice Chairman and Philippe Jadin & Flavio Soares for the unofficial Interim Advisory Board Council.
NEW Apertus Logo and Branding Released
Nathan Clark our Apertus Kangaroo Farmer and Art Director has been collaborating with Pete Flanagan - a professional graphics designer and together they dug through the entire logo proposal thread on our forums with it's 242 replies, analyzing every draft that has been posted there. After they soaked in all the ideas and concepts, Pete developed an idea for a "digested" logo proposal.
Unlike a common digestion process wherein everything just gets mixed together, Pete realized that the perfect common ground- best summarizing the ideas exhibited through our community logo proposals- is "simplicity". A clean and clear form that sums up all the ideas/backgrounds/ideology/etc. The impressive results of this synthesis can be seen below.
Features:
The origin of this design is an open source font called Titillium, with Pete taking things one step further by applying the fundamental freedoms of the GPL, customizing the typeface to form the new "apertus" letters.
Now the degree symbol "°" has very special meaning:
The degree symbol represents a lens or an iris/aperture as seen from the front
The degree symbol represents our world, with the Apertus community existing as an international force
The degree symbol can be written in ASCII and is thus 1:1 transferable into code: apertus° - putting emphasis on the "source code" background of the project
There is the term "degrees of freedom" (DOF) in mechanics
It can also be seen as the letter "o", standing for "open", "openness", "open source", "open source cinema" and collaboration.
The "o" is placed where a "TM" symbol (indicating patents/trademark protection/proprietary thinking) would normally reside. Instead of a conventional trademark symbol, we will utilise an "o" for Openness, which is the Apertus trademark.
Why Kickstarter moved closer to Axiom and at the same time further away
When we drafted our plan for how to create Axiom, it was clear that we want to use the biggest, most successful and widely known crowdfunding platform on the planet. This would push us towards using Kickstarter. But since Kickstarter was limited to projects based in the USA, we had to consider some workarounds, such as asking a US based Apertus member to run the campaign under his name. Following this however, we realised that this could have ended quite badly for this particularly helpful member having to pay many thousand dollars in income tax for the funds raised through our campaign. Now Kickstarter have also announced they will keep their promise for expanding into the UK this fall, finally landing on European soil. Since Apertus is a mostly European based project, this news brings Kickstarter a little bit closer to us again. We have UK based members and even setting up a UK based legal entity would be possible with reasonable efforts.
In a blog post entitled "Kickstarter Is Not a Store", it was announced that "product renderings" for hardware projects will be banned. This is where we’re now hurt the most. Any project seeking to create something that does not exist yet uses pre-visualization tools to create images of what they want to create. The most successful Kickstarter projects: Ouya, Pebble, Oculus Rift, amongst many others, would not have seen the light of the day if these restrictions were introduced earlier. We put a lot of effort into planning Axiom and creating 3D models of it to give you a chance to see what our concept might look like as a finished product. that you could hold in hands. In no way have we ever sought to trick you into believing that it was already an existing physical camera. Kickstarter tried to address the angry mob that formed after this announcement by stating that they do want technical drawings, CAD designs, sketches featured in projects, just no photo-realistic renders that would trick customers into thinking the product actually exists yet. So why didn't Kickstarter adopt a policy that renderings must be labeled as such. After all, projects that show very sophisticated 3D renderings are more likely to have a solid plan for developing their product than a project showing a pencil drawing.
So Kickstarter should have entitled their blog post "Kickstarter Is Not a Store - Yet (but we are working on it)". Some time ago crowd-funding was equal to user-driven-innovation far away from big corporate enterprises. The desire to reinvent the world bottom up is a fundamental part of the Apertus ideology. But in our view the Kickstarter bubble has already burst. Hardware innovation will most likely have to find other platforms in order to continue existing. What will remain on Kickstarter will most likely be hardware projects that are already finished and just seek a way to sell their goods in higher quantities.
The Path for crowdfunding Apertus Axiom?
The truth is we do not know where to go. Maybe we will figure out a way to use Kickstarter, maybe they will change their policy again, maybe they will finally respond to our support emails with a real answer rather than an automated reply with the link to the Kickstarter FAQ. Maybe we will use Indiegogo. The only certain thing is that our campaign will use the all-or-nothing system and that we won’t stop just because an obstacle comes along. Stay tuned, as we’re busy analysing the best route to resolve this problem. We’ll endeavour to reveal more on this topic soon.
Discuss this newsletter here: http://www.apertus.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=891
Best wishes to you all,
The Apertus Team