Jason van Gumster

Jason van Gumster does a lot of things. Mostly he makes stuff up. He writes, animates, and occasionally teaches. He has heavy entrepreneurial tendencies that run nearly as deep as his creative ones… so he has a constant fascination with producing creative content with as much control and independence as possible. Naturally, he's a big proponent of open source software; very nearly everything that he produces is made using Free and open source tools. Using those open source tools, Jason ran his own small, independent animation studio for 8 years. And in the course of that, he had the privilege of managing mid-sized international production teams on ridiculously tight deadlines (4-7 minutes of CG animation in 2 days)… for fun. He's transferred some of that experience in writing to two separate books, Blender For Dummies and GIMP Bible. The rest of that experience he continues blurt out a bit at a time during his weekly[-ish] podcast, the Open Source Creative Podcast. Currently based just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, Jason spends the majority of his time drinking coffee and trying to be awesome. The former he's pretty much gotten down to a science. The latter… well, every now and again he succeeds at that one and makes it look like it wasn’t an accident.