Blender-Brussels “lookback” workshop

Last saturday, we had our monthly Blender BPY/BGE workshop where we explore creative coding through the use of Python in the context of Blender. This time, the workshop was called “Blender lookback“, mocking the famous “Facebook lookback”. The goal was to explore the Blender video sequencer to automate the creation of video clips based on a folder containing movies and images.

The idea was suggested by Sophie from Radio Panik. She has a weekly program and would like to illustrate it with a generated gif animation. This could be extended into any movie based on a RSS feed for example. But for this workshop, we had a background video, a sequence of drawings representing an animation and had to composite this all together in a neatly gif file. The animation and the video would change every week, but the process would be kept the same.

The script is, as always, available from our github repository for you to study. It grabs the video and the images from the anim/ directory in two separate video tracks. It changes the contrast, adds alpha and colorizes the animation. Then exports the equivalent number of frames. Imagemagick is then used to convert all these in a neatly gif.

The Blender-Brussels BPY/BGE are a monthly series of free workshops organised by Julien Deswaef and François Zajéga. They are open to everyone interested in playful scripting with Python and Blender. Announcements are usually made on the Constant vzw newsletter and the Belgian Blender User Group (BBUG) forum.