LILA is a non-profit organization, under French law 1901, declared and funded in 2005.
We promote Arts and Artists, as well as access to technics and knowledge for everyone.
The association has its headquarters at 7 bis, rue Saint Hilaire
in Poitiers. If you like what we do, do not hesitate to send
postcards or other nice mail! 🤗
If you follow us on social networks (Twitter, Google Plus or Facebook), you may have read the
news: We are working currently with the animation artist Aryeom Han on a 2D animation project, entirely made with Free Software.
This movie is based off an original idea from Jehan, who had started — years ago — to doodle a small marmot who liked to sleep and nap
everywhere. He started to make it into a webcomic with the help of Aryeom.
It has been quicly decided to make it a short movie instead.
Summary
A marmot lives quietly in the Alps mountains. Its main activities? Sleeping, eating, sleeping again.
When a migratory bird comes and sings about the increbible world above the mountains, the adventurous
rodent leaves on an impromptu trip around the world.
Will he ever come back? Will he even want it?
We will only announce on LILA's website important stages.
So where are we?
Today we — LILA in collaboration with the 2 authors — just filed a request of funding for the scenario writing with the Île de France region (Paris and its suburbs).
It would help us go further on the project, and as a bonus it would fund partly some workshops. We planned a series of workshops to
introduce people to Cinema and Audiovisual movie creation with Free Software. We'd be able to lead these workshops and invite interesting
people on the topic. So this is doubly motivating for us to get this funding!
Well we won't be until mid-April, and as we all know, let's not get ahead of oneself. But we still wanted to announce this.
We'll keep you up to date!
P.S.: by the way, we just added a RSS feed on the website! If anyone here is allergic to social networks — and I get you! — but still
want to be kept updated easily, now you have no excuse anymore not to follow us through our RSS feed!
By the way, after all necessary resent calendars, we still have 6 calendars. If anyone still wish one, don't hesitate to
contact us to buy one! The donation accounts for Free Software projects are close,
so this money will go directly into the association activities.
Donator Statistics
In a month, we got 70 donators for 80 calendars sold.
The price could vary, a lot of people paid the minimum 15 €, but quite a few paid more, sometimes up to 30 €.
What really amazed us was a special donation of 390 € for a single calendar! This generous donator chose to stay anonymous (he told us
he sometimes send patch for some graphics Free Software, that's all you'll know about him).
In the end people donated an average of 22 € (17,5 € if you remove the super-donator whose extra donation really breaks numbers).
They came from 16 countries of the world, mostly France (23 donators), not astonishing since LILA is a French association, and though we
tried to promote internationally, clearly our French actions are better targetted.
Other donators came from Europe (Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Netherland, Poland, Czech Republic, United Kingdom, Switzerland),
North America (Canada and USA), South America (Brazil), Asia (South Korea), and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand). No need for detailed
numbers since this was not a competition; we are just proud to point out it was quite an international effort. :-)
Financiary Aspects
And now for some more numbers!
We raised 1766 €. Fees were the following:
Paypal fees: 45,66 €
Printing: 495,23 €
Delivery (post office): 299,26 €
Various (bubble envelops, sticker labels, lost calendars…): 69,16 €
In the end remained 856,68 €, thus a single part (divided by 8) of 107 €.
4 artists got their 107 €, Patrick David decided to give his part to Free Software
GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus therefore received 71 EUR (83 USD for GIMP and Inkscape to be accurate, their funds being managed by American organisms, respectively the GNOME Foundation and the Software Freedom Conservancy, also quite unfortunately the exchange rate EUR-USD were not great lately; as for Scribus, its funds are managed by a Canadian association, the Association québécoise pour le développement et la promotion des logiciels libres with which we also arranged the donation).
The Blender Foundation was donated a full part of 107 € (since we used 2 of their illustrations, they were
considered as an "artist" share).
The finale calendar is available in PDF here (138 M).
You can get a version with bleed too: the cover (25M) and the inside (114M)
if you ever wanted to send it to a printshop.
A smaller version is also available for the computer (still 33.5M).
Finally you can also get the super script which allowed us to easily generate dates on Inkscape before importing them into
Scribus. This script was provided by Martin Owens, his original script being available on his blog though he provided us with a more recent version, which we also modified.
Maybe we'll write a small tutorial for those who want to make their own calendar and can't figure out how it worked.
The Artworks
Images speak for themselves, yet I wanted to add a few words for each.
You probably guessed the reference, but what you may not have immediately guessed is that there is not only Wilber to find in this drawing
made entirely in GIMP. Some other mascots from the FLOSS world are having fun on this ski resort. You may find Firefox, Thunderbird
(Mozilla), Konqi (from the KDE project), Tux (Linux) GNU (Free Software Foundation), icedove (the Debian fork of Thunderbird), Puffy (OpenBSD),
Suzanne (Blender) and you can even find proof of GNOME passage…
Funny thing for these who know a little people behind GIMP, a dozen of actual GIMP contributors (developers, but also designers like
Jimmac, and tutorial wizards like Patrick David…) are visible there too! A very Librist ski resort, right?!
It was harder to find an image from Blender Open Movies than we thought, first because
the first movies were not using a large enough resolution for a printed project.
For instance, we really love the visuals of Elephant Dream, the first Blender Foundation's movie, but
it turned out that its max rendering resolution was 1920x1080, which is very low for the expected quality of a printing.
Of course we could have tried but we did not want to take the risk of a very low quality page.
So we finally used a frame from Sintel, which is nice and we like, but honestly I don't like it as much
visually as I liked Elephant Dream (of course that's just personal opinion).
A new render of Henri, of his serie "abstract landscape" unpublished until
now because it had been done specifically for us.
For full disclosure, know that this image took 8 hours of rendering!
A crop of one of the 2 banners used for the Blender Conference 2014. Therefore this was not exclusive for the calendar, but Ton
Roosendaal told us it had been unpublished in high resolution yet (at least back in October, not sure about now) and we thought it was a
pretty cool and cute character.
Henri was working on these robotic whales for some time now. So when we proposed
him to participate to the calendar event, he thought it was the right opportunity to finish this artwork! :-)
Gustavo lives in Argentina, in the south hemisphere. One of the most obvious consequences, and yet nobody ever thinks about it unless
they live there too, is that they have reverse seasons to most of the planet. So when it is summer in Europe for instance, it is winter
for Gustavo, and reciprocally. Some of us, in LILA, lived in New Zealand, so we know about this too.
This is why Gustavo had this nice idea of reverse his drawings, and he chose this one, with cold colors as his winter drawing… in July.
Well this one is clearly the scariest picture in the whole calendar, and "spooky" was definitely the point that Patrick told he wanted.
At first we were not sure why October had to be scary. But actually we remembered that this was the month of Halloween, a huge event
in the US (at least from what we see in movies). Well it is coming in Europe too, with commercial lobbies, but this is still not as
traditional an event as it is in America. And this is why, for Americans, October is supposed to be a scary month. Well another
interesting culture choc, right?! :-)
Patrick proposed several "planets" of this military ship, that he made specifically for the calendar. They were all very cool, some
collages were made looking like "eyes", but this one, with its huge canon, was highly intriguing, and this is why we went with it.
Patrick also explains that several official observances in the US related to
historical war events happen in November. Well in France we have the armistice day too, and in various other countries. Well that is
why the "first World War" is named this way, after all, isn't it?
Again in continuity of climate being opposite in North and South hemisphere, this hot-colored illustration illustrates December, since
in Argentina, this is the start of summer!
We concluded by a very funny strip, that is part of the calendar's conclusion, illustrating our opinion on the world "Arts and
Entertainment Industry" nowadays. It was not part of the "months", just an add-on. Interesting thing is that Nina Paley really promote a
very sane Arts world, and even went further than most copyleft licenses and Creative Commons, by promoting the Copy Heart license:
♡ Copying art is an act of love.
If everyone agreed, our world would be a much nicer place!
Contents
Calendars are usually very national since people like to know which are national holidays and observances, and such.
Yet since we wanted to be as international as possible, we pondered for quite some time what we'd put inside the calendar. Also we definitely
think that multi-cultures and languages are an important thing, and I told every artists that at least their artwork' s titles should be in
the language of their choices (funnily they all chose English titles though, even when non English-natives, except Gustavo who chose French
title, which is also very funny that he did not name his illustrations in Spanish. But he turned out to speak very fluent French too).
In the end, after testing various date possibilities (in particular we really wanted to not break the design too much by having too many
dates filled), we went for a mix of language and dates for all the 16 countries where we had buyers.
Now we got the names and list of dates on Internet and maybe we got some error here and there, though I hope not. If we did, sorry for this.
Actually we forgot some dates for sure, I think from the time we were fiddling with the list at the start. After the print, I noticed we
skipped at least 3 French observances in May (sorry for this all living in France!).
Also we added the Libre Graphics Meeting, from April 30 to May 2, but it appears it started the
29th.
The text in the end still is full English because a choice had to be made (not enough place to duplicate in 16 languages there!), and
English is the de-facto world communication language.
Finally we added a special event for GIMP. On 21th of November 1995, Peter Mattis announced for the first time ever "GIMP" to the world with this name (though there was a the in front at the time).
Which means that this year in November, GIMP will be 20 year old, which was an age round enough (if you count on base 10 at least) for us to
decide to make it a special icon on our calendar. We would have done the same for any of the other donation targets, but this was the only
one with a round birthday. Oh by the way, you can also find this special date on "Where is Wilber" mail in Aryeom's January artwork! :-)
Conclusion & after-thoughts
We learnt quite a bit with this event. Of course the intermediaries take the lion's share, as always. Yet it was a conscious choice to go with a
physical object. Though we are more and more connected everyday, all in digital, we think that the physical world still has its place. And
well working in graphics, of course that computers now hold a major role, but we still appreciate a good book or comic, don't you?
So we spent quite some time to find a printshop whose prices were not too high.
Next time though, maybe some other objects may be a better idea rather than a calendar? Maybe posters ou postcards? What do you think?
Ideas?
As for the number of donators, 70 is ok, but honestly we were hoping at least the double. On the other side though, we were not perfectly
organized, thus we also feared worse. For full disclosure, we got this idea about 2 weeks before November, so this was all done in quite a
rush. Therefore the result is acceptable. Next year we'll prepare much in advance and do better!
Another point we thought may have been a mistake was to choose 4 donation targets. This considerably diluted the donation to each software.
If Patrick hadn't given his share, GIMP, Inkscape & Scribus would have got only 35 € each. Of course it is nice to give to more projects but
less efficient. Next time, we may do a smaller selection.
Finally don't forget to answer our small survey. This will help us
improve for the next time. Thanks!
The association LILA has had a new address for 3 months, but we did not organize any opening
for it yet.
On Samedi 20th december of 2014, from 4PM to 7PM, we will welcome anyone at 31, avenue
Parmentier, at Paris 11th (France), with juices, tea, coffee and some biscuits if you wish
to speak with us and know what we do.
Grégoire Coustenoble, our co-funder, will expose some photographs on the "giraffe" topic.
LILA is an arts association whose goal is to improve artists and spectators conditions,
for all to have access to knowledge and arts technics, for artists to be able to make
a living from these; and spectators to be able to legally and constructively enjoy these,
and for arts to get back from the "entertaining industry" ranks.
Don't hesitate to come and say "hi!" if you're around!
Hey all! Our Libre Calendar 2015 event comes to an end.
You just have 2 days before we go to print, and then the number of calendars will be set and finale.
Just as a teaser, below are low res versions of some of the images which will go in as CC by:
Crédit: "USS Alabama Small World", by Patrick David.
Crédit: Blender Conference 2014 promo graphic by Andy Goralczyk, kindly provided by the Blender Foundation.
Crédit: "Where is Wilber", by Aryeom Han.
Crédit: "chimères des fleurs", by Gustavo Deveze.
Crédit: Robotic Whales, by Henri Hebeisen.
And that's not even half of it! When you buy the calendar, what happens:
you get nice artworks nicely printed;
you receive high res resolution links for all these artworks in CC by;
you sponsor nice artists;
you sponsor nice Free Software and Free Art projects (Blender,
GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape,
and us, LILA association).
Nous aimons l'animation stopmotion. Si vous n'êtes pas sûr de ce dont il s'agit,
le principe est tout simplement qu'au lieu de filmer avec une caméra, on prend des photos, image par image.
Un exemple des plus connus sera le film Wallace & Gromit,
fait entièrement en pâte à modeler! Génial, non?
Bien sûr, on peut faire cela avec des jouets, aussi, comme dans l'atelier pour enfants dont nous avons montré
le résultat il y a quelques semaines.
Malheureusement il existe peu de logiciels Libres de stopmotion, et en général de qualité très moyenne.
L'un des plus connus est Linux Stopmotion,
mais malgré une reprise de développement, il est extrêmement instable. Nous avons contribué plusieurs patchs,
mais de manière générale, nous n'étions pas satisfait. En outre il est clairement focalisé sur les webcams,
ce qui est très bien par exemple pour des ateliers avec des enfants ou s'amuser à moindre frais, mais pas
lorsque nous voulons filmer des projets plus sérieux en haute résolution. J'ai trouvé quelques autres projets,
mais toujours très instables, et en général abandonnés.
Puis il y a quelques temps, nous avons découvert Entangle, un logiciel
fait pour contrôler son appareil photo réflex à distance depuis son ordinateur. C'est exactement ce qu'il faut pour
filmer en stopmotion (un appareil photo qui ne bouge pas, sur un pied), en très bonne qualité. J'ai donc commencé
par rapporter voire corriger quelques bugs, notamment pour la fonctionnalité toute nouvelle de "calque" permettant de voir
plusieurs photos en transparence et ainsi estimer les mouvements. Ensuite je me suis rendu compte que mes tests me poussaient
à effectuer beaucoup de photos (or chaque photo provoque une ouverture de l'obturateur, ce qui réduit sa durée de vie). J'ai
donc implémenté l'obturation électronique, qui est en gros juste le fait de sauver l'aperçu en guise de photo. La qualité
est alors médiocre, mais bien suffisante pour des ateliers, des démos ou des tests, par exemple.
Mais tout cela n'était pas suffisant. Il nous fallait un moyen de prévisualiser notre animation, notamment le timing.
J'ai donc récemment implémenté cela, et si tout se passe bien, cela devrait
se retrouver dans Entangle à un moment ou un autre. Mais il reste des points à peaufiner, comme la position des contrôles.
Je vous propose ci-dessous un aperçu de notre état des lieux du développement:
Notez que cela ne fait que commencer. Nous comptons bien apporter bien plus de fonctionnalités qui pourront faire d'Entangle un
logiciel de qualité professionnelle pour des animations de qualité. Les idées foisonnent, mais nous en parlerons plus tard. :-)
