Blender's Open Movie Project

MrAndrews writes "I just read on the Blender home page that Ton Roosendaal is going to be creating an open movie project called "Orange", which should kick off development sometime in the fall: "The Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts, have agreed on producing a 3D Animated Movie Short, to be created with the Open Source 3D suite Blender and other OS tools such as Yafray, Python, Verse, Gimp, and Cinepaint." Moreover: "... the resulting movie - including all the production files and software - will be published under an open public license." Open source entertainment is another step closer to reality!"

Comments

Re:Trying to understand the point

[Beolach]

So make a fork. If you disagree with the direction something is going, and that something is Open Source, you can take what you do like, and leave what you don't. If you're the original creator, and you don't want people doing that, then don't use a Open Source license. Since these people are using an Open Source license, I doubt they would mind if you made a fork of their movie.

Funding?

[kjh1]

While this would be quite an accomplishment should it come to reality, and could set the establishment on its ear, I can't help but thinking from browsing through their site that it's still 'vaporware'. Just take a look at the Sponsors page. They're requesting 6 quality 3D Unix machines and a 10-system rendering cluster, among other things.

I wish them the best of luck in their endeavor.

Folk music

[el_womble]

Open source entertainment is nothing new. There are plenty of examples from Folk Music and Hymns to Pantomime (christmas plays, that have nothing to do with christmas). You hear a song, you play a song, you change the lyrics/tune to suite your own politics. You never claim to have written it yourself, you just say something like "Here is a song I heard over in Sheepy Magna, it goes a little something like this..."

Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive. My understanding is that it was brought about to protect the incomes of the artists, whilst provide recording companies to profit from the sale of recordings. Now, as recording companies start to fear for their livelyhood, it seems to be coming full circle.

People have always been able to make a living from providing entertainment and they always will (if they're good), they have not always been treated like gods and they have not always been richer than our leaders. Never mind the dotcom bubble bursting, I think the entertainment copyright bubble might be leaking a bit too.

Re:Folk music

[natrius]

Copyrighted entertainment is new, and a little bit counter intuitive.

Copyrighted entertainment is as new as the means to copy the entertainment is. Copyright came right behind the printing press. It expanded after the player piano. Being able to copy creative works changes how things work.

You describe a time when people create works to entertain themselves and didn't need copyright to prod them along. Folk music and hymns were satisfying entertainment until someone who was really good at singing decided that she could go and perform in front of a crowd and people would pay her to do it. People enjoyed being entertained by professional entertainers more than by themselves. So this trend continued.

Once the means to copy this entertainment came along, that business model broke. People didn't need to go to concerts to hear music, because they could hear it in the comfort of their own homes. If anyone was allowed to copy these performances and pass them along, very few people would attend concerts and the performers wouldn't make money anymore. They would stop writing new songs.

Lawmakers all around the western world saw this problem and enacted laws to prevent this from happening. The (American) founding fathers themselves explicitly gave Congress the power to make laws that would promote the progress of science and the arts by giving their creators special rights.

So you're probably wondering why we can't just go back to the original system we had where we would all entertain ourselves. The cat's out of the bag, and imposing artificial limits on copying creative works is hard to enforce. That's true. But most people don't want to go back to the way it was before.

The quality of creative works that are made by people who can devote large chunks of time to perfecting their works is far more often than not greater than that of someone who is just trying to pass the time in between naps and meals. The reason we gave up the right to copy works as a society was to increase the quantity and quality of creative works we'd have available to us as a society. It works, for the most part.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things wrong with copyright law, such as the extremely excessive duration of copyright. But that doesn't mean we need to do away with it. Instead, the laws as they are now should be fixed, and the people who want to give others the rights that are assigned to them as creators when they make a work are free to do so by using the various licenses out there that make it easy.

You value the ability to share and build on top of other people's work. Other people value the quality and quantity of works that copyright makes possible. If you'd rather the shared paradigm win out, support the people who share their works. When you do that, they get the benefit that copyright was supposed to afford them, profit, and you and society as a whole get the benefit of being able to use the work with much less restrictions. Put your money where your mouth is. Head over to Magnatune and buy and album. Click the PayPal donate buttons on the sites of peoples works you enjoy. Do something to give people an incentive to create and share their works.

Re:Trying to understand the point

[sgant]

Then again, collaboration also leads to great things too. You can't lump everything into one basket and say "it will suck, without question, because of this".

Don't like how something is going? You yourself can lead it in another direction if you wish. I don't know how many times I've watched a movie lately and said to myself "wow, this really needs to be edited more". Case in point is Revenge of the Sith...there are a few things in there I would slice out to make it a better movie. One would be to take out the Frankenstein moment at the end with Darth Vader learning about killing his wife....take out the "NOOOOOO". I mean, that was just bad. SNIP SNIP...that's gone. Also take out the "She's lost the will to live" bullshit.

And being able to edit a movie could lead to better understanding of just what movie makers face with pacing and story telling.

Re:Trying to understand the point

[natrius]

I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine. Collaboration in creativity leads to such wonderful dreck as sitcoms and "dramedys". Just say no.

I agree. Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm. However, there are other ways that Free thinking can help this type of creative project.

There are some aspects of these projects that can be done piecemeal. Films typically have soundtracks, and most filmmakers aren't composers/singers/musicians as well. With shared work out there, filmmakers can build on top of the music that other people have put out there.

Taking video clips from a shared work can be useful as well. In many typical dramas and sitcoms, they show a little clip of the city the story is taking place in or a shot of the skyline. Most people don't have the resources to do that sort of thing, but if a video that incorporates such a clip has been shared, another creator can make there work better by leveraging off of work that has already been done.

The traditional open source methodology seems to be the focus of this article, however it seems that they have a core group working on the creative concept, though they say that others from the community will be involved as well. The collaboration of many people on the technical aspects of the film will work fabulously, but there are some things that just don't lend themselves to that way of working, and I think they realize that. I think the main benefit from shared crative works is being able to reuse bits of that content that suit new works, not the way people put them together. People have collaborated on creative works for a long time. The new development is that the product of that work will be able to be built upon by others.

I actually have a research project on this topic that I should be working on instead of reading Slashdot.

Re:An Open Source Script?

[Adrilla]

...or maybe you end up with a group of people who just keep overwriting each other with aimless direction. Just imagine a stadium full of people trying to decide where to eat lunch. Wouldn't be pretty.

Re:Trying to understand the point

[arose]

Stories aren't things that can be put together piecemeal, and generally don't adapt well to the traditional open source paradigm.

Ever heard of folklore?

see it as a proof of concept of a tool chain

[KnightTristan]

I agree entertainment is not something that is better of "free" per se. Though it can be. It's a matter of taste.

However, I guess you have to see this project more as a proof of concept, that it is possible to create something like that using only open source tools. To try convincing others to use them to create open source or non-open source entertainment.

Tristan.

Re:Trying to understand the point

[MrAndrews]

I've been mulling this whole open entertainment concept for a few years now, and what you said was what I always came back to: too many directors and you get a big mess.

The key, I think, is not that anyone can or should be in charge of changing the script, but that anyone can contribute to the final product. How many developers have commit access for the Linux kernel? How many can suggest changes and have them integrated if they're good? How many can fork the entire codebase at any given time to focus on a version they want to see developed?

Most video entertainment is written by at least two people anyway (writer and story editor), but the real difference in open entertainment is that anyone can freely (in both senses) adapt what they do. And not just in the same context, but as branches from the main work... using a short throwaway scene from Attack of the Clones as your base, you could write an entire series about the adventures of some long-forgotten character, and not worry about a lawsuit from Lucasfilm.

Open source methodology actually fits amazingly well when you think about the limitations we already impose on the software side of things, and figure out their equivalents in entertainment.

Re:The next killer app

[MrAndrews]

I read about this kind of product a few months ago (probably here) where one of the newer game engines was being adapted to work in a super-Machinima environment... you would basically just "tell" the characters to go from A to B and wait, and then move the camera around to capture the shots as you like. RvB with finer control. My feeling is something like that is almost entirely in the UI, so if one could completely re-write how people interact with Blender's animation tools, you could probably achieve what you're after.

On the other hand, you still need the story and models and voices etc. But I agree it would be a fantastic next step.

Collaboriation hardly means Piecemeal

[FreeUser]

I'm not sold on Open Source entertainment. I have my tastes, you have yours. I doubt that you'd appreciate my imposing my creative vision on your work, and I know that I would resist your attempts to impose upon mine.

You don't seam to "get" collaborative projects. Don't feel bad--I used free software almost exclusively for years (based on quality, not politics) before I understood how and why collaborative projects work so well. When one is spoon-fed "you get what you pay for," "profit motive required for progress/production," "no one will create without monopoly entitlements (patents/copyright)," and similiar corporate untruths all of one's life (and we have all been spoonfed that nonsense since they day we were born), free collaboration can be a very difficult concept to get one's head around. As I said, it took me years, and I'm generally fairly quick.

First, collaboration != piecemeal. For that matter, Free Software is rarely piecemail either--equating the two shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the process and its results.

Second, unlike writing a novel (where what you say has some applicability, though by no means is it an axiom--there have been collaborative novels written in the sci-fi genre by well-known authors that are excellent) nearly every film and telivision project of any size involves multiple writers (in the case of telivision projects, sometimes hundreds of writers), and hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people performing supporting functions (compsing the soundtrack, performing the music, lighting, choreagraphy, set design, editing, post-production, etc.).

In short, virtually every project of any size is a collaboration--we're just not used to seeing it as such. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing intrinsicly different between a large collaboration done under the the auspices of a commercial enterprise and that done under an open collaboration, other than perhaps the overall budget that is available. Star Wars Episode 3-1/2 "Revelations" is a fine example of a fan film made entirely through collaboration on a tiny budget.

Yes, collaboration can and does produce absolute dreck. So to does Hollywood...in abundance. Profit motive and corporate-feudal power structures do nothing to insure quality, nor are the a prerequisite to the production of quality, whether it is software or a film.

I do agree, doing the entire project start-to-finish using only free software would be a powerful demonstration of what is possible using only the resources of the Free World.