Greetings from #rdcHQ! It may be quiet at our web site, but behind the scenes we have been very busy! The Cobwebs Crew had their first two Fall meetups of the season and have been researching new software for the next phase of the project.

We took a close look at Toon Boom Studio for 2D animation and Blender for 3D animation, the latter of which we have bookmarked for future Cobwebs explorations. The crew is already working in Toon Boom as it has similar functionality to several of the programs they were working in this summer; primarily it replicates many of the functions of Inkscape and Pencil which will eliminate the need to switch between programs. The goal is to streamline the process of animation while maintaining the original quality of the drawings – so we plan to combine aspects of traditional animation with the digital methodology outlined in this diagram (via Toon Boom):

This weekend, the crew began creating the scenes for the “Quail Farm” which is the next scene in “Cobwebs – The Animated Series” -

Quail sketches by Evelyn Jennings, Gabby McCutcheon and Nate Malamud.

Final scene mockup for Crew Review next meetup.

Pencil sketch of the Young House (Deluxe Model) – another key element of Scene One.

More to come from the Cobwebs Crew! Stay tuned!

Greetings! After a very exciting summer, we are jazzed to announce our first ever Fall Track at #rdcHQ! This Fall, we’ll be in maintenance and outreach mode with continued work on projects in process and new partnerships in the works.

Cobwebs – Chapter One
More exciting episodes from the Cobwebs Crew are planned for the Fall! The Crew will be reuniting to work on Chapter 1 of Episode 1 (“The Pearl of Power”) … stay tuned for Cobwebs – The Animated Series.

The Cobwebs Crew at {~beaux libre*} courtesy of the Port Orford News

SVG/DocGen Post-Production
Our work on the CCR continues with the production of more diagrams in the SVG Track. We’re pumping out graphics daily in the Perspective and Diagrams III groups and readying our art for release. Our DocGen Track is also wrapping up – we’ll have announcements when the project reaches completion at the end of October.

Life on a Redwood Post, Part II
We’ll be working on the next phase of “Life on a Redwood Post” with docent and author Scott Peden shown below with BugPeople’s Eddie Dunbar. In this photo they are holding one of the first copies of the book produced by The Rural Design Collective 2012 Mentoring Program.

Scott Peden and Eddie Dunbar during Bug Day at Henry Cowell State Park

Port Orford Community Stewardship Area / Planning Phase
We are beginning work on a project new to the Rural Design Collective to support a local initiative known as The Port Orford Community Stewardship Area. This addition to our project pool is in its early planning stages, and we’ll have more announcements soon.

More news from our Post-Production Phase! We have 950 forms converted into Interactive Form PDFs using Nuance PDF Converter. In combination with our basic text and tables set, this makes exactly 1502 document objects that have been transformed from substandard scanned TIFs to open Hybrid PDFs that can be edited in a program such as LibreOffice as well as downloaded and filled out on the WWW. We still have approximately 500 objects to convert – there is a workflow under development at #rdcHQ that will facilitate the conversion process.

Our MathML Track is represented in the second poster in our diptych that debuted at {~beaux libre*}. Designed by Rebecca Hargrave Malamud and featuring the equations that were coded and converted during our 2012 mentoring program by MathML/DocGen Project Lead Jasper Shumaker Pruitt and webchickbot -

{~beaux libre*} / collaborative publishing art by the Rural Design Collective / Poster 2 of 2

Post-production on this track will last through October as we begin our Fall Tracks at #rdcHQ. Stay tuned!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We are officially in post-production mode in our SVG Track and are wrapping up the diagrams in our Perspective and Diagrams III groups. During this time we are also preparing the SVG graphics we have created for use in the CCR document set, and readying the original art for reuse in other applications and document sets.

A fine art diptych was designed by Rebecca Hargrave Malamud for our annual art exhibition, {~beaux libre*}, using the illustrations and equations that were created during our 2012 mentoring program (mad props to the SVG project lead Levi Thompson and webchickbot for art production) -

{~beaux libre*} / collaborative publishing art by the Rural Design Collective / Poster 1 of 2

Post-production on this track will last through October as we begin our Fall Tracks at #rdcHQ. Stay tuned!