Slashdot Mirror
Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
Joe (and many others) writes "This month has seen the internet release of the first 3D 'Open Movie', Elephants Dream." From the site: "The 3D animated short 'Elephants Dream' will today be released as a free and public download. This is the final stage of a successfully completed Open Movie project which has been community-financed, using only Open Source tools, and opening up the movie itself as well as the entire studio database for everyone to re-use and learn from. The movie and production files are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 2.5, which only requires a proper crediting for public screening, re-using and distribution."
Only playable in: VLC Media Player MPlayer
fak3r.com
30MB MPEG4 (blendertestbuilds.de)
Update Oct 17: Here are some other mirrors and compressed versions made by the community!
24MB MPEG (BitTorrent)
9MB Xvid/Vorbis OGM
fak3r.com
ummary from Motevideo:
Elephants Dream is a story with quick-witted dialogue, tightly designed architecture and unusual sound effects. The main characters, Emo (a cool young trumpeter) and Proog (a confused - or maybe not? - loner) are each stuck in a world of their own. At a certain moment they cross paths with one another. The oddball Proog cautiously tries to introduce his young friend Emo to his world. When Emo realizes that Proog primarily wants to push his ideas on him, this leads to a conflict between them. But can Emo survive in Proog's world? And can they overcome their conflicts, or will they each go their own way in life? Tygo Gernandt and Cas Jansen create two unique personalities that command the imagination, and carry the viewer along into a bizarre world that consists of a bleak wasteland with a tangle of cables and other alien landscapes, a living typewriter, an enormous elevator shaft, and especially a lot of very strange birds.
Also checkout the Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants_Dream
fak3r.com
"Elephants Dream is a computer-generated movie made using open source applications that premiered on March 24, 2006. Beginning production in September, 2005, it was developed under the name Orange by a team of seven artists and animators from around the world. It was originally known as Machina, before being changed to Elephants Dream to more closely match the way the script was developed.
The film was first announced in May, 2005 by Ton Roosendaal, the chairman of the Blender Foundation and the lead developer of the foundation's program, Blender. A 3D modelling, animating, and rendering application, Blender is the primary piece of software being used in the creation of the movie. The project is joint funded by the Blender Foundation and the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The Foundation raised much of their funds by selling pre-orders of the DVD. Everyone who preordered before September 1 has their name listed in the movie's credits. A number of companies also donated render farm time for the movie.
The film's purpose is primarily to showcase the capabilities of open source software and evaluate it as a tool for organizing and producing quality content for professional films.
During the film's development, several new features, such as hair and fur rendering [1], were added into Blender especially for the project.
The film's content was released under the Creative Commons Attribution license [2], so that viewers may learn from it and use it however they please. The DVD set includes NTSC and PAL versions of the movie on separate discs, a high-definition video version as a computer file, and all the production files.
The film was released for download on the Official Orange Project website on May 18, 2006, along with all production files.
"Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
Content on Wikipedia is covered by disclaimers.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I've posted an article on the background of this project: http://www.blendernation.com/2006/05/18/the-worlds -first-open-movie-released/
Enjoy!
The whole point of the project was to see if a movie could be created using Blender 3d. It's called the Orange Project and they have a blog about the production. The Orange Project website, however, is currently slashdotted.
When it comes back you can check it out at: http://orange.blender.org/
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
No Final Cut Pro, all composting and editing was done inside Blender.
http://www.isw.uni-stuttgart.de/~xbk/Filme/Orange/
n t 18-May-2006 14:41 25kt 18-May-2006 14:41 8kt 18-May-2006 14:41 12k
Elephants_Dream_1024-h264-st-aac.mov 19-May-2006 10:39 312M
Elephants_Dream_1024-h264-st-aac.mov.torre
Elephants_Dream_1024.avi 19-May-2006 10:32 425M
Elephants_Dream_1024.avi.torrent 18-May-2006 08:18 33k
Elephants_Dream_480-h264-st-aac.mov 19-May-2006 10:29 98.8M
Elephants_Dream_480-h264-st-aac.mov.torren
Elephants_Dream_720-h264-st-aac.mov 19-May-2006 10:25 145M
Elephants_Dream_720-h264-st-aac.mov.torren
Elephants_Dream_HD.avi 19-May-2006 12:42 815M
Elephants_Dream_HD.avi.torrent 18-May-2006 21:24 32k
though a big hooplah is often made about "OSX workstations" only 2 out of 6 workstations were running OSX- the rest were running linux (x86 platform). All the creation tools used for the movie were open source; no final cut, no photoshop. Editing was in blender, as was compositing (the compositor was in part coded specifically for the movie). Rendering was in blender, running on donated renderfarm time (the renderfarm runs OSX). The "making of" movie on the DVD was not made by the core team, rather by a seperate group of film-makers- they used their own tools (I believe final cut) so that may be where the rumor arises.
Yes, they released their source.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Yes. If you buy the DVD version you will get all the textures, bender modules, etc used for this movie. You can copy it, modify it and release it, as long as you provide credit where credit is due.
What power has law where only money rules.
The film was edited using Blender's sequence editor. This is discussed quite a bit on the "making of" DVD documentary.
One of the biggest developments of this project (imo, as a filmmaker) is the vast improvement of Blender's sequence editor. The RAM usage has been fixed up so well that it now functions very well as a non-linear editor, and doing complex cutting is easier than any other open-source program. 2.42 will also integration with FFMpeg, so it will be able to handle a multitude of formats.
"The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer."
As we try to inch closer to perfect, we actually get worse results from the general populace. Maybe film CG will break the valley, but it's a long road.
Actually, a proffesional script writer wrote the story. I suggest you go through the movie a few times (say , 10 ) before saying it's a tech demo, because it's not. As for the technical aspects, there are always places to improve, the beauty part here is that you will be able to load the blender scene files and fix it yourself. No need to wait for anyone else.
Everyone is forgetting that Open Source Motion Capture is not here yet. The hardware for motion capture is still quirky and expensive to get working with any of the very few OSS projects out there and it's in it's really early stages for Blender Motion capture.
as soon as they get motion capture working the "jerkyness" will disappear and end up 100% identical to hollywierd productions as that is all they do.
REmember, this is people doing it for fun as a hobby. Pixar programmers do it for insane salaries and with an insane budget.
They get to get there faster simply because of the bottomless Visa card they get.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We tried our best to make a Theora/Voribs file for the release, but weren't able to. I (a Mac user) spent the best part of a week attempting different things to encode versions from 1024 down, analogous to the H.264 ones. I even installed Linux on an old PC in the hope that it would make things easier, but it didn't. Our audio guy was in contact with Ogg Vorbis developers and produced what may be the first 5.1 surround Vorbis file in existence. Currently, after a lot of trial and error, I'm left with an Ogg Theora video file, and a stereo Ogg Vorbis Audio file. They seem both fine on their own, but when I tried to merge them with oggzmerge, the two are out of sync. Along with the encoding of the other files, the release of our new website, our promise to release the videos, and thousands of screaming fans, I didn't have time to keep trying so we released as is.
Hopefully when the release fuss dies down I'll blog about it and try and get some help. In any case, those who condemn others for not using open formats should actually try and use them themselves. I'm sure Theora would get used a lot more if it were easy, or even at least possible for content producers (i.e. artists, not developers) to actually use. My experience hasn't shown that to be the case so far.
Cheers
Matt