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

[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.

Great news

[saintm]

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

Oh.

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.

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? :-)