Creators of Morevna Project, an open anime movie, started a fundraiser to cover the $2200 worth expense of keyframing the demo. Should they succeed raising funds, the team will be able to be done with the demo by the end of the year.

Morevna Project is an open anime movie loosely based after “Marya Morevna”, a Russian fairy-tale, and set in futuristic environment. The movie is being created with Pencil (animatic), Synfig Studio (actual animation) and Blender (compositing, FX, more animation).

Much like in case of open movies by Blender Institute, the point of Morevna Project is to give Synfig Studio, a free 2D animation package, a damn good testing, develop useful feature and thus make it a better tool.

All the data is already open, the whole script is large enough for a feature film animation, the demo will be 4 minutes long. Here is a week old snapshot of the demo.

Konstantin Dmitriev (left) and Nikolay Mamashev (right) actually recorded a video appeal with subtitles in English, provided below. It also explains, where the project is now and what they are hoping to achieve with this community sponsored demo.

Why is it important to support Morevna Project?

The folks are not some random guys and girls who came out of blue. They've been around for several years now, actively supporting the upstream Synfig Studio project: testing it, writings specs, improving the website and even developing features.

Here are some of their more significant contributions, in both code, templates and detailed specifications:

Stickman template. A workaround for the skeletal animation.

Camera View. A workarond for a camera simulation.

Keyframe widget. Allows dragging and dropping individual keyframes and altering keyframe length with a mouse.

Smart Linking of Tangents, for easier sewing of different shapes.

Advanced Outline. Strokes that change their width, e.g. depending on Wacom tablet pen pressure.

Outline Grow. Changing width for all outlines inside of the paste canvas with a single click.

Nikita Kitaev even created a SIF exporter for Inkscape (part of the upcoming v0.49). Together the team also created Remake, a tool for automatic rebuilding of the animation footage. The latest version of Remake, released mere two weeks ago, features support for Blender 2.62.

So basically you are helping Synfig to become a better product.

What do you gain?

Apart from supporting a cool project that makes Synfig more usable? The Pledgie page specifically covers various ways of gratitude, from mentioning you in credits to featuring you in the demo and even creating a dedicated animation.