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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."
"What we're seeing here is just the free market at work, re-adjusting itself to the distortion of the past 20 or so years. It's clearly obvious to many that a movie star is not worth $20 million per movie these days. They can easily be replaced by high-quality, CG actors and actresses. Thus their real value has declined significantly."
Translation into slashspeak: I want free movies. Of course as the saying goes, "you get what you pay for".
Whatever. The thousands of low budget copyrighted short films produced before this "open" short film didn't kill Hollywood, and neither will this one. If you think Pixar and Dreamworks are worried, you're seriously deluded.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
They could have been replaced by human actors as well, many of whom can act better than those paid $20 million.
"It's clearly obvious to many that a movie star is not worth $20 million per movie these days. They can easily be replaced by high-quality, CG actors and actresses. Thus their real value has declined significantly."
Clearly obvious to geeks, maybe.
The reason that Joe Public goes to see a movie is not for the plot, nor for the special effects, but for the star power. People will see Pirates of the Caribean for Keira Knightly and Johnny Depp, not because it's about pirates.
Even if we replace actual actors with CGI clones, or purely CGI characters develop, it will cost $20 million to license their image, because star power is what draws people to the movies in the first place. The movie industry is one of the freest markets, and I think it's a tough case to make that the money stars make is somehow distorted.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Truly a shame... especially if the claim of a previous poster is correct "VLC or MPlayer only". Both of these play Ogg Theora for example on Linux, Mac, and Windows. If you're already using a format that doesn't work by default with, say, QuickTime and Windows Media Player, why not go all out and use Theora?
P.S. It looks like the latest version of Xiph's QuickTime Components has preliminary Theora playback. And there have been DirectShow (Windows Media Player) filters for Ogg codecs for some time now.
P.P.S. Anyone know that status of Dirac?
I'm absolutely shocked that you're not the CEO of Mattel by now, with brilliant thinking like that.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
CG actors and actresses don't come close to the realism, emotion, or raporte that real ones do. I personally doubt (and kind of hope they don't, because it would be somewhat creepy) they never actually will. CG is a great medium for getting creating fantasy (like with Toy Story or Shrek) or for unique special effects (like the Matrix or Fight Club...but not Star Wars. ILM owned CG in the original trilogy, in my opinion).
Where you are right is that real actors aren't really worth $20 million or whatever a film. I'll bet there's thousands of aspiring actors out there with just as much talent and even as much good looks as the celebrities who roll in the dough from major productions. The reason they do get the money though is marketing. It's a familiar face and a person who's given the audience a positive experience before. How many people go watch a Tom Cruise movie just because it's Tom Cruise (although I no longer understand the appeal behind that one)? How many CG films still pay out big bucks to get major names doing the voice acting?
I'm not saying that a movie can't succeed without big name actors, but it's almost like an insurance policy. The major studios can basically rely on a certain amount of income based entirely off of who's name is with the movie.
I saw the whole thing, and it is obvious that this movie was made by technology geeks, and not cultural geeks. The graphics is easily in par with commercial movies, but the script sounds as if it was authored by a chatbot.
All the comments seem to be focused on the open source aspect, which is cool and very important. However, did anyone actually watch this movie?
I watched it the other day (I think it was on digg or boing boing or something). I thought it was insanely bad. It was like I came in halfway through some crazy anime. I didn't know what the hell was going on. I couldn't even begin to figure out what the characters were suppose to be feeling or thinking.
This has a cool factor going for it, but man it was painful to watch. The 3D work was well done as far as textures and models, but the animation seemed really awkward and bad.
I don't think anyone should be patting themselves on the backs too hard yet. If this is what the open source model can produce for entertainment, then I don't think Pixar has much to fear.
However, the possibility for movie remixes should be pretty cool.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Uh...in a word.....no.
CG actors aren't even close to replacing human actors for most things. CG actors are great for cartoony characters that humans couldn't do anyway. You try to sell a CG actor, in their current state of development, off as a real human actor people immediately spot the fact its synthetic, start noticing all the little traits that aren't human, it immediately starts bugging the audience, they get distracted and turned off by the whole movie. Animation tools simply aren't there to pull off a synthetic human for any length of time. Its really hard for an animator to key every nuance of a lifted eyebrow, or just to lip sync well to a sound track of a voice recording. When an actor speaks every motion and nuance is perfectly in sync with and natural for the audio track. It takes enormous effort for an animator to just get close and then they still don't nail all the nuances of emotion that goes along with whats actually being said. Again it works for cartoon characters because people don't expect perfection. As soon as you try to pull off a synthetic human everyone does expect perfection.
Human actors who have real character, like Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall are a pretty valuable commodity, though I will agree many actors today don't rate the salaries or praise they get. A key problem is they are often working off bad scripts and with bad directors.
I wager part of the wasteland that is film today is because todays movie makers, script writers and actors grew up in the TV age and are remarkably devoid of creativity and character. This is a reason we see so many crappy remakes of medicore plots and TV shows like Bewitched. I'm wondering if the rising generations will do better. They grew up in the Internet age and have the ability to search for ideas, and their searches can take them in a billion different directions, versus the one spoon fed direction TV takes its viewers. They have an increasingly vast pool of information and ideas at their disposal so maybe they will be more creative than the current largely failed generation of film makers.
@de_machina
The movie industry is one of the freest markets
Except for that whole (un)limited time monopoly known as copyright...
In reality, it is two weirdos running through psychedelic landscapes and talking mostly nonsense. The graphics are very well done and quite imaginative, and the big battle at the end is cool - the Colossus rocks, even if we see just a hand.
But no, this thing has no real plot. Sorry. It just doesn't. It is, essentially, a demo. Perfectly understandable, since the whole point of this project was to see if you can make a movie with free open source tools, and a success as such - but for this very reason the whole script is simply and excuse to show as many special effects as possible. They are very good, and the whole thing is quite entertaining in its own surreal way - but the description you gave assigns it philosophical qualitites it just doesn't have.
Don't get me wrong, movie makers: your work is truly amazing. However, you if the description given was what you wanted to say, you failed. The reason for this failure was giving too much priority for FX, and failure to give the viewer any frame of reference (maybe you should have shown the two people meeting instead of starting from the middle of their journey ?). This improved somewhat near end, but most of the movie was just too surreal to carry any recognizable meanings.
So, basically: a huge technological success, mediocre at best in storytelling, characters simply didn't interact enough with each other (or anything else) to develop any personality beyond simple "youth curious, old forbids him" stereotype.
Nice surreal tech demo, but only that.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
With no background, the viewer is thrown successively into four or five disjointed sequences where the same two characters move through a ludicrously-impossible "machine" which has no apparent purpose.
I thought I must surely have only seen the trailer. No, that was the whole film.
The voice for "Emo" was very wrong somehow, I can't put my finger on it. Might it have been done by several different people? No reference at all to Elephants.
The "description" in the parent to this article is bogus because half of the things it mentions aren't even in the film! There was no "quick-witted dialog" because there was hardly any dialog at all. Emo is a trumpet player? That wasn't in the film. Proog is a loner? In the film he's always with Emo. Proog doesn't "cautiously introduce" anything, but shouts "Follow me!" before dashing along narrow, railless, flipping catwalks with hostile bird-things swooping about. If Emo feels that Proog is pushing his ideas, well, I can't imagine what those ideas are since the guy doesn't say much of anything except that the machine is "beautiful". These characters don't have any conflicts to work out, except where Emo wants to go through a door with calliope music coming from behind it and begs like a three-year-old.
This film doesn't "carry" the viewer at all. It drags the viewer, kicking and screaming, through complex scenes with no coherence. One reaches the credits and says, "What was that about?"
Yah. Must be "art".
Also, it would be cool to have a downloadable ISO, to burn directly to a DVD and watch on a TV instead of in the computer. It's also an easier way to pass it around to non-tech people who would like to watch it.
Go hug some trees.
The difference is that Pixar has hordes of great artists, producers, directories, writers, etc. working for them. They have the tools and the talent. Not to mention the marketing, distribution, name recognition, etc.
Sure.
What we have here is a bunch of people that worked to create tools and give them away for free. Without compensation. We then have another group of people who created a movie for free. Without compensation.
What you have here is a gift economy. This has nothing to do with primitive "free market" economics.
I couldn't agree with you more. And calling it a "movie" or "film" is just... well.... WRONG. A ten minute psycho-trip with no story, no plot, and uninteresting/undeveloped characters is more like a graphics demo. Perhaps a video hardware benchmark (HD).
I am impressed at the graphics... and the open nature... but that is about all it has going for it.
Script writers shouldn't render 3D demos, and geeks shouldn't write scripts. That's the moral of the story.
While the scenery, effects and character modeling were intriguing and really really well done, the character animation was odd and crude.
The voice acting and dialog not just lack any logic or consistency but were flat out annoying.
One would wonder why they spent all those resources and time on creating this animation but didn't care to get a decent screenplay at first.
All in all, it may've used OSS tools, but they followed the good ol' Hollywood paradigm: all effects and the story sucks.
Why on earth is it only available in those formats rather than being a straight MPEG?
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