Elephants Dream Creator Talks to Wikinews

An anonymous reader writes "Three days after the Internet release of the free content 3D short Elephants Dream, Wikinews exchanged e-mails with Ton Roosendaal about the reaction to the film, open source filmmaking, and the changes to Blender that resulted from the production."

Comments

Creating Extra Buzz.

[crhylove]

If you really want to draw people into the whole FOSS arena and generate pieces in the real world, make it applicable to real life. I think an all CG documentary about LOTS of subjects would dominate text books, and making one under GPL or GML or whatever would make it an editable improveable piece that could be used again and again, and improved over time by every viewer or instructor who used the material. Plus I can imagine quite a few topics where CG graphics would help clarify the subject matter for the student. Maybe even some computer lessons. Now granted, clippy sucked, but maybe FOSS can do a whole shit load better...

rhY

Topic Ideas: Something about ancient architecture. A biography about the works of Leonardo Da Vinci. A Mortal Kombat game featuring Leonardo Da Caprio. I'd love to do that fatality.

A review:

[ledow]

Well... yes, the graphics were quite impressive, however the animation looks very clunky at times. Although the static and slow-moving graphics looked fine, the walking motion and some of the fast action looked very bad (I actually checked to see if my player was skipping frames).

The audio wasn't fantastic - a little jingle of music, a few sound effects and Emo has a very strange accent (and, BTW, what is the Colossus of Row-Des, I thought it was Rhodes, as in "roads"... maybe that's just me being on the right side of the pond). There's little emotion or character in his voice, either.

The "plot" is just plain weird but we'll excuse that on the basis that there isn't supposed to be any plot (read into the plot what you like but it's not present so you can say that anything "represents" anything you like... I hereby declare that the plot could be about Emo the technophobe not wanting to use the clunky old tech that his father used, in the same way I use CD's where my dad used vinyl).

By making the plot weird and the animation clunky, they've actually achieved the opposite of what they wanted - they relied on DVD pre-orders and grants to get this off the ground and, now people have seen the result, they won't be getting many of those for their future projects. Plus, when people next say "we want to use Blender to make X", everyone's going to remember this.

I can't see this being something that people will share around to go "wow" at with their friends (unlike that short about the little robot who wakes up in a room on a spaceship (Blue?), anyone remember how much that cost to make?) so very few people are going to realise this even exists. If they do, they are going to be one of the people here just disappointed with what's been produced after they've spent a lot of money on a DVD pre-order.

The arty-farty types will adore this film if for no other reason than nobody else can understand it and it's been called art.

Re:A review:

[Helios1182]

This sums up my impressions as well. In the previous thread someone said that this should scare the crap out of Pixar and the like, but I still think that is wrong. They may have the tools to make a good film, but the pure level of talent and experience is lacking.

This would provide an excellent opportunity for those with talent to show it off and strive for a job in the field though. As nice as Free software/media is, you still need to pay the bills. And there is nothing stopping you from working on side projects for free.

Great questions

[nEoN nOoDlE]

I thought the questions asked were really great compared to most animation interviews I've read which usually just appear fanboyish. I'm glad the interviewer asked about the story and character animation which I felt were the films biggest weaknesses. It's too bad that Ton decided to side-step the issue and not admit flaws.

"Yeah, the challenge the artists set themselves - to use quite realistic personages - is also something that easily works against you"

yeah yeah, we all know about the "uncanny valley" (and if you don't, there's a link :]) but that wasn't the problem that Elephant's Dream had. The animation was just bad. It was obvious that most of the people working on it were better at modeling, texturing, and lighting than animation. This is something that's fairly common in CG animation. It's usually broken down into "character animation" and "everything else." Where you'll find lots of great generalists who know about modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, particles, etc and then you have the animators who don't do the technical stuff as well but can bring the characters to life.

Re:Great questions

[nEoN nOoDlE]

Any animator worth his salt studies real actors, and is a "real actor" in their own right. Acting is a huge part of learning animation, and books have been written on the topic. That said, acting is also a later step in the learning process. Before that, animation teaching is usually started with the 12 principles of animation which are:
    1. Squash and stretch
    2. Anticipation
    3. Staging
    4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
    5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
    6. Slow In and Slow Out
    7. Arcs
    8. Secondary Action
    9. Timing
    10. Exaggeration
    11. Solid Drawing
    12. Appeal

These principles were defined by the original Disney animators in the 40s and 50s, and are widely used today as the base of animation learning. You can check out a great resource about the animation process, written by 2 of Disney's Nine Old Men, here.

Ton in the interview said:
...so you accept a certain level of non-realism easily. (Check the weird walk cycles in The Incredibles for example).

This kinda just goes to show that he's just spouting off a "factoid" he's read or heard about. The "weird" walk cycles in The Incredibles - while maybe not "photorealistic" - are done that way for a purpose, following the principles listed above to make the character and animation more appealing. Animation is often about getting an appealing looking movement than a "realistic" looking movement. It's just that oftentimes, if you make a movement too unrealistic, people who are used to seeing such a movement will notice that there's something wrong with the animation.

Also, whether the character is "realistic" is irrelevent. The 12 principles still apply, but are just toned down. These things weren't pulled out of a hat. They were observed in human movement and exaggerated to make those movements more clear. Nobody could deny that the original Disney animators really observed what they were trying to animate. In fact, during the making of Bambi, Disney brought in a deer carcass so that animators could study the skeleton and muscle systems in a real deer. One of my professors in school who used to work for Disney showed the class the resulting book they made out of that research.

Re:my opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I thought it sucked badly.

Everything have been already said to the stupid story. We could add things about the camera movment et al, but it is overshadowed by the failure that this story is.

We've seen this stuff in Imagina dozen oftimes. Teenagers trying to be deep and arty.

It is very unfortunate, as I, as many others, can't send show this movie to anybody I know, without feeling ashamed. Compare this to the first Pixar shorts. It is such a waste...

Ok, storytelling is hard. I can admit that. In that case, they should do something else. Avoid the story. I don't know, make a 5 minutes breath-taking space combat sequence, Enders Game style. Play with scale, like IBM did in the famous power of 10 sequence (zoom between some bacteria and its environment).

Anything that could be showed to other people. Not some sub-Kaena story (I would never had thought that ANYTHING could be sub-Kaena, story-wise).

And, when you see that his favorite 3d animation movie is Ice Age 1. What a pity. That is one of the very worse animated movies, story-wise.

The only positive thing they may have done is that someone will look at it, and think that it is easy to beat. And maybe it will spark creative offspring, using the same models.