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
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
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!
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