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.)
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!
"...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
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?
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
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