Earlier this month TEMBE, a group of argentinian animators, publicly released "Viaje a la tierra del Quebracho" — the open movie they worked on most part of the last year.

Actually the premiere of the movie took place on December in Santa Fe during a film festival. However the team wasn't happy with the soundtrack's mastering and decided to postpone the online released till it's remastered. So in February the movie was finally posted online in HD. And here it is.

According to Manuel Quiñones, director of the movie, the premiere went fine. “The reception was impressive!” — he confided — “Roomful, I received a lot of congratulations for me and the team.”

The project was done by two groups of artists. All the painting and animation work was done by TEMBE, and the team who did compositing with Blender was Licuadora Studios (who are probably more well known for their participation in Sintel).

As the movie explores social themes, the team of animators did quite a bit of work on background checking to get into the spirit of the time they pictured, going through old photos, visiting places etc.

The approach to creating the movie was doing hand-painted backgrounds (in acrylic over cardboard) with digitally composited animation on top of it. All animation was done in a customized version of MyPaint created by Manuel specifically for this project.

We asked Manuel about his further plans for the application, and he replied:

I want to take the fork and do a new GTK+ application. I want to base this work on a new open movie and imagine skilled artists in the community getting involved :)

This more or less goes in line with what MyPaint team's view on extensibility of the application. Earlier in November they expressed an interest to make certain parts of MyPaint reusable libraries.

Manuel hasn't yet revealed his plans about the next movie. The top priority right now is to uploading all the sources. So he's currently discussing possibilities of storing all the project data online.