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

Trying to understand the point

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

What I suppose is interesting about this is that the final product will be open and available for others to use. Free from copyright, so to speak. It seems like a nice idea, much like Creative Commons, but it doesn't seem like some really huge step forward in any respect.

The complete open-sourcing of the toolset would be cool (Blender and a few others are already open).

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.

Re:Trying to understand the point

[Beolach]

What I suppose is interesting about this is that the final product will be open and available for others to use. Free from copyright, so to speak. It seems like a nice idea, much like Creative Commons, but it doesn't seem like some really huge step forward in any respect.

Sorry for the double reply, but this is a common misconception that I forgot to mention in my other post. Open Source does not mean free from copyright. Many Open Source licenses have stipulations on what you are required to do in order the use the licensed material in a certain way - for example, the GPL states that if you make any derivitive works, those derivitive works must also be licensed under the GPL. It is only because the material licensed under the GPL is protected by copyright that the GPL can make this stipulation. If the material was not protected by copyright (in the public domain), then anyone could use it in any way they wanted, without abiding by any stipulations of any license agreement.

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: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?

How about Weta or Pixar?

[pjbass]

As far as I recall, doesn't Weta and Pixar use Linux for their OS in the render pools? I concede that LOTR certainly didn't open-source the artwork, nor did Nemo et. al, but how much closer to open-source entertainment are we with this? Do I get to see the movie for free (small donation optional)? I'd go see it if I got my Sour Patch Kids for free I suppose...

Re:How about Weta or Pixar?

[ciroknight]

As a student, I looked into many different fields before I chose computer science. One of which was digital film making. I spent a summer shadowing a documentary film crew, and I can tell honestly tell you that the amount of work that goes into even the simplest of films is insane.

When we start talking digital animation, the amount of work leaps exponentially. Long hours of modeling, shading, color checks, lighting checks, triangle counts, waiting for renders, etc. It's a tough business.

The "suicidal" part comes in when someone suggests making a feature length film, animated, basically with no money to pay people to come and work for you. You're looking at a group of 10 to 20 dedicated people, spending a great deal of their lives for the next year or two, churning away at scenes, storyboards, models, textures, etc, until finally they come up with something, instead of Pixar's or Dreamwork's thousands of support personel. You're looking at 10 to 20, midrange servers whereas Pixar or Dreamworks has hundreds, possibly thousands of highrange servers in their rendering farms.

Now, will the final product be worth it? Hell yes if it's a good story, looks good, and feels good. Put it in theaters, get a couple million in ticket sales and you've instantly paid for your venture. But the problem is getting even that far. And for that, I would call you suicidal, but I would commmend your work.

Great news

[saintm]

Lets hope it does for movies what Tux Racer has done for video games.

Oh.

Re:Great news

[MaestroSartori]

Funny you should say that...

I recently took a trip from Glasgow to Amsterdam, for a job interview. In Glasgow airport, I saw a Tux Racer arcade cabinet!

I was actually pretty shocked, didn't know the thing existed, but the little kiddies playing Tux Racer seemed to be having fun.

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.

Re:What's it about?

[nacturation]

Ever play that game as a kid where you go around in a circle and you make a sentence by each kid adding one word? It's just like that, only with animation.

The tools used

[LetterRip]

Since they will be using Blender, you might be interested in the upcoming features that the next release will have along with some of the scripts available

have a look at the development digest

http://cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=233256

Blender now has manipulators and universal undo - two things that lots of slashdotters complained were missing the last time Blender was mentioned on slashdot.

LetterRip

Re:Blender + Orange?

[Dancin_Santa]

Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking?

I think so, but where are we going to find a duck and a hose at this hour?

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.

More details on the people involved in the project

[LetterRip]

Those of you not involved with Glender won't recognize the names of three of the individuals involved in the project thus far,

Bassam Kurdali aka slikdigit - created the animation 'chicken chair' among others.

Andy Goralczyk aka @ndy - has done both gorgeous stills and lively and fun animations.

These are two of the best artists/animators using blender, both have excellent imagination and the talent to accomplish any bit of artistry they put their minds to.

and lastly Ton Roosendaal - he is the creator of Blender and the primary driving force behind its open source development.

With this combination of talent being the driving force behind project Orange, we can be sure to expect something truly entertaining and masterfully executed.

LetterRip

Blender

[abell]

Blender is a truly impressive piece of software. I went a few times through the following steps:

• Install it out of curiosity
• Open the interface and try and "figure it out" for ten minutes, being unable to do anything but move and rotate the default cube
• Close and uninstall and forget about it for months.

Then I bought an apartment and to test out various furnishing options I finally decided to seriously learn how to use Blender. It took way longer than 10 minutes to come to terms with the interface, but once you learn the various shortcuts interaction with the 3D space becomes really efficient. Now I completely love it and use it even for creating simple images. Who needs a pre-made icon of an arrow when I can generate a 3D model and a 2D rendering of it in a few minutes.

Not to mention the facts that the package is smaller than your average text-editor, its start-up is almost instantaneous, that it runs identically on Windows and Linux and that you can extend it with Python routines?

Oh, and did I mention that I love it? :-)

Re:Will FOP be soon behind?

[neongrey]

There's porn that isn't free?

Re:More details on the people involved in the proj

[nunchux]

That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will be beautiful, but who's writing the actual story? I work in animation and I have seen many beautiful shorts, demos and portfolio pieces by many extremely talented technical animators... And most of them are boring and meaningless exercises, if that. Or they're based on a joke that's not funny in the first place.

Myself, I'd rather watch the pathetically animated but extremely funny Home Movies on Adult Swim than the beautifully and painstakingly rendered but pointless Final Fantasy movie. Good characters and storytelling should come first, I hope this project realizes that before embarking on this effort...

Verse

[Emil Brink]

Heh. As a full-time developer of the related technology, I'm glad the mention of Verse survived into the blurb!

Verse is a low-level data model, network protocol and programming API for dealing with distributed applications involving 3D graphics and audio. It is completely open and distributed under a BSD license so you can use it in any kind of application.

For details, see the top-level Uni-Verse site (toplevel page about the current research project). If you're a developer, perhaps heading directly to the Verse pages is more interesting. You could also check out the specification for the Verse core technology. Or why not just surf the CVS and read some code? :)

If you have questions, you could drop by #verse on FreeNode, or use the mailing list. More developers would certainly not hurt.

Render@home?

[photonic]

From the linked website:

Render farm: Especially during the last 3-4 months, november-march, we need online access to a render cluster allowing Blender to render movie resolution frames. Our estimate is that it will require at least 10 systems to render 3 months continuously.

I am not really familiar with the technicallities of rendering, but wouldn't it be possible to use some distributed client model instead of a rendering farm? You could make a program similar to SETI@home that downloads the wire-frame of the scene and sends back the rendered frame once completed. Might be really nice for a screensaver since you actually have a picture to show instead of some alien noise. They estimate 10 systems full-time for 3 months. I guess the same work could be done in the background by 1000 systems in a few weeks.

Some issues that I could imagine:
-reproducibility: subsequent frames that were rendered by different clients should look exactly the same. This means that only a project provided rendering core can be used, no tinkering allowed by the user.
-copyright (not an issue in this case): suppose Toy Story 7 would use this concept. I guess Disney/Pixar wouldn't be to happy if all the frames were posted online well before the final release. Posting only low-res previews might actually create a big buzz.

Re:Blender + Orange?

[MoobY]

You can find the stuff you need at amazon for $14.40.

Blender is "deceptively good"

[Vektuz]

I recently switched over to blender from the more 'expensive' tools due to its extreme flexibility, open source nature, but also because it actually makes a lot of the big tasks pretty simple. It takes a little longer to learn the interface, but as people are starting to learn, different is not necissarily bad. Blender3D and the amazing "Wings 3D" winged-edge modeller make a powerful team.

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.