Greetings GNOME Community! My name is James Coddington, digital media artist and principle of Zero Point Systems. I find myself fortunate to have found you all and am inspired by your humanitarian direction. I greatly appreciate that free software makes it possible for people in 3rd world countries to use computers and connect to the greater world at large, is affordable for the disadvantaged and is accessible to the disabled. The ability to translate into so many different languages is particularly exciting to me!
I come to you with enthusiastic inspiration regarding the graphic media (or lack thereof) of the GNOME community. I must admit, however, that I am novice GNOME user.
Upon being familiarized with your cause and software I feel you could reach a much broader audience if you were to integrate a little more flash (asthetically) and could be made much more attractive with animation, video and sounds. It is my hope and vision to create compelling visual stimulus for this emerging and growing community.
I designed and created an animation that could be played as the user logs into their machine to make the experience more exciting.
I have a wellspring of ideas of how video and animation could be used in the desktop space. One of which could be that we provide an introductory video that could be viewed to highlight the usability, freedom and humanitarian aspect of the project and why people should even consider using GNOME. We could then turn this animation/video in to a television commercial with the idea it could be played on PBS or other types of public access. I know that showcasing work on some public access channels is completely free. This would be a great place to get airtime for humanitarian related content.
Some things that could easily and should be highlighted
It's Free
It's Easy
It's Accessible
Support
Many Humanitarian aspects, like the fact it is used by the one laptop per child program.
I'm sure there is more that could be added here. Any suggestions of what we could add?
I have already donated a significant amount of time on this intro animation, so it is my hope that that translates into how emphatically enthusiastic I am about this project! It is also my hope to release this under the Creative Commons with a small personal signature for networking purposes. Perhaps I will utilize the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Liscense.
Again, your cause and community is something that I am very excited about and would love to get some ideas and feedback on the animation I created.
http://www.soaringbrain.com/GnomeTest2.swf
I am aware that to be truly free these movies need to be converted to Theora or another free format, but I thought I would get your input and feedback before progressing any further.
Keep in minds these are low-resolution renders. Perhaps together, we can sink our teeth into this amazing opportunity and create a very compelling, high res series of projects that will generate interest, momentum and wonder in the open source project known as GNOME! Lets set Gnome apart from the rest with rich visual content that grabs the user and won't let go!
Feel free to view and get back to me at
soaringbrain gmail com.
Gratefully Yours,
James Coddington
MVM Digital Media
773 780 3473
