Animations

Murray

Murray

Self publishing encompasses a lot more than just writing a book and putting it out there, and Libreleft Books will be publishing “The Girl In The Blue Flame Cafe” this year. Since launching a book with fanfare can be a pricey proposition, I’ve decided to try my hand at crowdfunding with Pubslush, a crowdfunding platform specifically for books.

I’ve been using the excellent GNU/linux video editing suite Kdenlive to put together my Pubslush pitch video. Unfortunately a lot of other things have been competing for my time; consequently my crowdfunding campaign has taken rather longer than I had hoped.

As it turns out, the video I am making will very probably be too long for a pitch, but once I have the content the way that I want it, I expect to divide it into two (or possibly three) shorter videos. I’ve chosen to do them all together (everything is connected) because it gives me more options for all the videos.  The extra video(s) will be available to anyone wanting to know more about my project.

Just now I’ve been putting together some small animations I will be incorporating into my video(s). Back in the day I played around with some animation at Sheridan College, but it’s been a while, and the tools for creating media have changed pretty drastically since then.

This was my first attempt:

Then I decided it would be nice to use a photo of my cat Murray curled up next to a book for the background. I had previously used this photo to illustrate my book review.


But then it occurred to me that this might prove to be problematic, since the video I’m making is a crowd funding pitch, it would certainly constitute a commercial use that does not qualify as a fair dealing exemption to copyright law.


Anyone who has ever tried to get a cat to pose for a photo will understand why I chose to digitally replace the book with my own.

I thought the animation of might be too slow so I sped it up.

Which of the blue versions do you like best… the 4 second or 2 second version?