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."

Comments

Re:Just the free market at work.

[lawpoop]

"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.

Obvisously a technology demonstration

[Enselic]

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.

How good is it?

[hexix]

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.

Re:Any information at all?

[ultranova]

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.

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.

Huh... it must be "art".

[rdmiller3]

"Elephants Dream" had wildly complex animation and sound. That much was very impressive. Aside from that though, it was an incoherent mess.

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".

Re:Any information at all?

[suv4x4]

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.