This week, the Cobwebs Crew created sketches for ALL of the characters (!) and learned more about the tools they will be using to create their animated series …

Creating digital art in Inkscape, an open source illustration program –

Video production for the animated trailer in iMovie (Director’s Tool of Choice)-

Our animators hash out the details during a snack break –

The sound directors brainstorm the soundtrack –

Next week, the Cobwebs Crew will be taking a break for the Fourth of July holiday — when they return, it will be time to begin work on the series itself!

This week in the SVG Track, we quickly stepped up the Inkscape pace and moved into more complex illustrations with patterns and charts. We mentioned this technique last week with the Interpolate + Exclusion tutorial. This is an excellent way to introduce another layer of meaning when creating basic line-art drawings, and when used in conjunction with color the effects become quite sophisticated.

It is easy to see how the same technique can be used to quickly create uniform grids used in informational charts. These patterns are added to our ever-growing graphic library and consistently remixed in new illustrations. We’ll publish more of these elements during our post-production phase.

#rdcH(Queue)

We’re making good progress as a team in the various tracks – we’re just getting started, and we have already completed 148 MathML + SVGs and have a fresh batch of OCR files to begin processing for our DocGen phase. We’ll be figuring out what structure to add to that data in the coming days … Go #rdcHQ Go!

This week in the MathML Track, we made a lot of progress on our first batch of equations. 47 simple equations were completed and ready for review. We also updated our workspace to reflect our new production schedule that has been expanded to include more document generation techniques since the equations only make up a small portion of the content.

Jasper gave a few pointers on basic math logic, but for the most part our initial batch looks correct (we’ll add the source to the site soon) and we are establishing an efficient process for checking our work and generating the final SVGs. Although our final output will be SVG 1.1, we think the best method to check our work is by reviewing an audible rendering of the equation using Design Science’s MathPlayer to be certain that the structure is correct since it is not always possible to determine that visually with Presentation MathML. This will also ensure that we are compatible for screen readers down the road.

In researching our best practices, we discovered that the MathJax 2.0 CDN now has an SVG output option! From the MathJax website:

In addition to the HTML-CSS and Native MathML output available in v1.1, MathJax v2.0 includes an SVG-based output jax. This should prove to be more reliable than the HTML-CSS output, as it avoids some CSS, web-font, and printing issues that the HTML-CSS output suffers from, and it currently has no browser-dependent code. The SVG mode even works in some ebook readers (like Apple iBooks and Calibre).

We couldn’t agree more and are very pleased to see this new feature! It would be wonderful if the individual SVGs could be downloaded, but that does not appear to be an option at this time. Fortunately, stand-alone SVG versions of MathML equations can be created using our tool of choice, SVGMath.

deBUG – Life on a Redwood Post

In deBUG news, our new edition of “Life on a Redwood Post” is about ready to make its debut at Bug Day at Henry Cowell State Park on June 30th …

More news next week!

This deBUG Day, we focused on development for the primary characters in “Cobwebs – The Animated Series.” The kids began sketching how they envisioned the characters in the script, and a new character was introduced by artist Evelyn J., and rendered in Inkscape as a production-ready sprite by the Cobwebs Crew:

The kids discussed the importance of creating original art and we will explore sourcing clip art resources, creating derivative works, and attributing sources as the track progresses. They also worked on ideas for background music for the scenes and a theme for the series. Next week, there will be additional development on the sound track, completion of character and scene storyboards (which were given to everyone as part of our first meetup), as well as production on a Cobwebs Trailer! Stay tuned!