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
Anyone else have to read that title a few times before it made sense?
This guy's the limit!
Breakfast served all day!
YOU CAN'T MAKE OPEN-SOURCE MOVIES!!! Who gets the money??? Who sells shitloads of licensed garbage??? My head is about to EXPLODE!!!
Also from the site:
> 425MB (USA #1)
Not for long, it won't be.
(Where are an elephant's genitals located? In his feet. Because if he steps on you, you're fucked. Any parallels between a webserver with a 425 MB .avi file that just got linked on the front page of Slashdot are purely coincidental.)
"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".
Open movie...open build process, open tools... But...no open codecs.
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
"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!
Now we know what people will do with 4 cores and up. Render their own movies.
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.
"...so please, please remember - when you make "open" movies, you don't just take profits away from some Hollywood fat-cats; You hurt the gaffers and set designers and makeup artists and fluffers and all the rest of the "little guys". Without all of them, the movies you love just couldn't exist!"
"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
...was to live on a muddy peanut farm in a world without circuses or pianos.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I wonder, and I am too lazy to research, whether being open source
also means that I could download the 3d models they used and create
my own film stories, TV commercial, product endorsements, pron, etc...
Is there any "open source", copyright-free 3d model characters out there
that one could just grab and use ?
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
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
> Hello, I am Eliza.
* Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
> Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.
* Web Release of the Open Movie Elephants Dream
> Say, do you have any psychological problems?
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.
If you're interested in some more resources for Blender (or info on the movie), try checking these places out:
Blendernation
Blendernation article about Elephants Dream
Blender Artists Forums
Collection of WikiBooks
Elephants Dream on Wikipedia (in case you don't know anything about it, considering the main website is down and the original poster didn't say much of anything about the short itself)
Blender on Wikipedia
Seriously, though, considering how much has been happening with this project, and what a significant milestone it is for those who use OSS and/or CC, I find it almost sad that this is the first story on Slashdot in almost exactly a year. And that it took Slashdot editors well over a day since the first story submissions (some with links directly to the torrents to avoid killing the Elephants Dream homepage immediately) to get this up. Maybe I'm biased (I pre-ordered the DVD 9 months ago), but I just think that stories about people doing amazing things within and beyond the community deserves precedence over the latest reports about what the PS3 might cost. Not to anger anyone, just to toss that up for discussion.
No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
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".
cd movie ; ./configure --pg13 --with-keanu=/usr/local/actors/keanu --with-lindsay=/usr/local/actors/lindsay --disable-product-placements && make && mplayer movie.out