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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."
The movie sounded like a feature film - it wasn't. It was a very thought-provoking piece, however. I've got to say the graphics were impressive.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
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.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
...are you tallking about? My spelling is perfect!
For those who didn't see it the first link here are the movies again, hope you enjoy it
http://orange.blender.org/
LetterRip
to remember never to post mirrors to 400meg or 800meg files when they think they're going to get slashdotted. those servers that were mirroring the video were litteraly hammered to the point of non-recognition. Even the edu server they had was trailing less than 10KB/sec.
HD Trailers
Nice interview, although he sidestepped a couple of questions... like the one about closed source sound software. He just seemed to go off at a tangent there.
the layman's guide to computer science
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.
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.
:]) 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.
"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
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Here's some more information about the background of this project:
s -first-open-movie-released/
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/05/18/the-world
Cheers,
Bart
It is interesting that Slashdot crowd got a little bit trollish about quality of movie and skiping it as "unimportant". I tend to disagree here.
Movie by itself is truly piece of art. Yes, technically there ARE many problems. Character's movement where out of place in lot of moments, lip-syncing was heavy problem. But in overall, I have checked out movie about three times - first time got me confused - and I say it made me think. It is quet interesting in short movie genre and I would disagree that is just "showcase" for Blender. It stands on it's own. Let's not mention that it was hard to imagine in first place that it was created with Blender.
Project is a success. It gained some serious attention to Blender - check out Blender and 3D software forums - and gain Blender some serious supporters. I think Ton achieved what he wanted - kudos to him about that.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I was at the premiere in Amsterdam and had a chat with some of the creators at one time or the other. Allthough we all grieve a little over the jerky anims one should keep in mind the following:
1) The timeschedule for a project like this was extremly tight. Remember they didn't have *anything* when they started. Not even a basic plot!
2) They had less experience in film project management than a guy that doesn't do blender all day but watches 'making of's'. Bassam (the director) said that he learned a storyboard and animatics are really important but it's important to move on fast from there on. I could've told him that right away. Then again I don't know a tenth of what Bassam knows about Blender.
3) They got stuck in the middle and took the time for experimenting and redoing animatics, which they, sadly, didn't have. Final anim started to late. Even the extra month they added in the end wasn't enough to give them room to breathe.
4) They didn't prerecord. Very big mistake. One guy said "There was so much emotion in the voices we had to redo some anims". Would've you thunk? Actors can act. It's what they do for a living. *ALLWAYS* prerecord unless you've got an acting director who has the skill to railroad the actors into the anim stance. And even then it's still better to prerecord.
5) Blender was extended with features they needed while they where requesting them *without* having a reference to other packages. All these guys are the elite when it comes to blender. IIRC none of them has any notable experience with any other package. Matt likes to toy around with ZBrush but Andy, for instance, is a 100% Blender guy. Watching him Blendering gives you a good reason why. When he's doing a little doodling in a break at the blender conference there's allways a bunch of people crowded around his workstation looking over his shoulder with amazement. It's absolutely fascinating just to watch this guy work. Then again, whith a feature list beforehand the parallel development of Blender would've gone quicker and features would've even been there before they where requested.
6) The jerky anims are paid of with awesome details that you usually don't notice at first viewing. In fact, one could say that the '2nd unit shots' are the actuall piece of art in this. That fits the lack of experience the Orange team had with larger productions. Bassams mechanical characters just plain rock. That's a fact.
7) AFAIK they where rendering in production which took away some time. Usually you outsource that or another dept. does it. I don't think they used renderplanet, which, if not, they should have.
8) All OSS Tools. Thats the single largest obstacle. The OSS tools are impressive, but OSS NLE and Compositing is just plain no match at all for, let's say, Apple Shake or Digital Fusion.
9) The benefits of compositing only became aware at the beginning of the project and key personell didn't have enough playing time to try things out, imho.
All in all I have to say that I am extremely impressed with the results. As for the semi-finished anims: As it is entirely open, there is no one at all stopping us from reanimating the entire move. The strange background of the story offers countless oportunities to extend the original and the fact that the riggs will be published gives pure animators a chance to show off their skills. Everyone can say: If you don't like it, redo it. A true OSS project indeed. Once again the Blender Community has shown true spirit. Ton and Team Orange rul3Z0Rz!.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I must say... it is breathtaking in the visual department, but as everyone here with logical minds have already stated, lacks any form of coherent dialogue or story.
So.. the simple solution, seeing that the film is open-source, is to get all the source material and re-dub the dialogue to something which doesn't resemble the ravings of lunatics at a mental hospital.
I've been teaching CG/animation in a high school for the last three years. I pushed hard to use free software so that my students could continue working on any projects they got excited about. One of the biggest challenges I faced was wiseacre kids talking smack about how much better Maya/3DS max is, as an excuse for not doing great work in Blender. (Don't get me wrong - those are amazing packages - I'm a Maya user, but wanted all of my students to have legal access to software we used).
I'll show Elephants Dream in my classes today - yes, the character animation stinks, yes, the plot is hard to understand, but the look is beautiful. It should be a nice way to prove the point that having expensive software isn't the solution to every problem.
Out of curiosity, have you ever created anything with Blender? I'm not trying to troll or flamebait, I'm genuinely curious.
I have created with Blender, although it was many years ago (c. '99-00). At first I hated the GUI. I ranted and raved on the Blender forum. Then I quit wasting time venting about how things weren't 'standard' (by which I, and many others, meant, 'Not the same as apps in the Windows world') and started learning how the GUI actually worked. After some time climbing the fairly steep learning curve, I realized that the GUI was actually laid out fairly logically...if you worked the 'Blender way(tm)(c)(r).' If you wanted to work the 3DSMax or Maya way, you were SOL. But, maximizing productivity with one of the closed-source, Windows-based apps requires climbing a fairly steep learning curve, as well.
In my opinion, that is what Mr. Roosendaal is getting at with his statement. In the Windows world, the learning curve associated with becoming productive with Maya and Houdini (and 3DSMax, etc.) is celebrated as proof of their quality and worth. On the other hand, the learning curve associated with Blender, although really no more steep than that of the closed-source alternatives, is descried as proof of it's lack of quality; lack of 'readiness for the commercial world.'
Is Ton a fscking blowhard? I dunno. He seems to have created a fairly complex piece of software that allows the user to accomplish a certain set of tasks (once they've grown accustomed to the GUI and workflow). That's more than I've done, how about you?
-- .sig available; 50-yr mortgage, interest only payments!
This
Does anyone know what the title means?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Bad storytelling? What story. The premise is not a story, per se, more of a concept. There is a 'story' that unfolds in order to convey the concept, but that's not what the focus is on. As he says, if their prime intent was a story, then it's quite easy to make a funny film with cute animals in it. It's not that difficult to work out the idea behind it, especially if you watch more than once (as it is intended to be viewed) and double-especially if you talk to other people about it.
im in ur
Isn't there a spelling checker in slashcode?
Yes, but its disabled because they can't afford the supercomputing cluster needed to cope with the work load.
Blank until
>>Bad storytelling? What story.
Exactly.
>>The premise is not a story, per se, more of a concept.
Let me guess. The concept is: "unwatchable mess that makes no sense". Brilliant.
>>As he says, if their prime intent was a story, then it's quite easy to make a funny film with cute animals in it.
Making something funny is not easy. It's really easy to make something incoherent and seemingly pretentious.
Look, the movie could have had the worst animation and been rendered in wireframe; good writing, direction and editing would make up for that many times over.
I interpreted his statement in your first quote as him saying Maya and Houdini have unnecessarily complicated interfaces. I haven't used Houdini, but comparing Maya to Blender, I agree. I didn't find Blender "intuitive", but once I read the Wikibook, it did become simple. Like learning one instrument after another, there's a learning curve, it is different, but it isn't complicated.
Just curious...what do you think the story IS, actually?
Translation: I didn't understand it, therefore it must be crap. Many people have understood it, including myself. It's not that difficult.
"Look, the movie could have had the worst animation and been rendered in wireframe; good writing, direction and editing would make up for that many times over." How wrong. You should view ED as, first and foremost, a tech demo. The main point was to improve blender. Second to that comes making a movie. Since it's not a movie that tells a story, you shouldn't criticise it for not telling a story. It's there to do something else - be pretty and tell a concept.im in ur
I guess I misread the title when I first thought of:
C ElephantDream.html
http://70.86.201.113/imageserv2/temporary/PBF014B
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
>>Many people have understood it, including myself. It's not that difficult.
This should be on the DVD cover.
>>It's there to do something else - be pretty and tell a concept.
Yeah, whatever. It still fails at being remotely interesting; which I think is a shame.
Who do I see about getting a refund on my wasted bandwidth?
Seriously! I know they made it primarily to showcase the open source software, but they could have at least made an attempt to make it mildly entertaining!
--alop
Personally, I found it very interesting. That's what compelled me to watch a few more times to properly understand it. The concept is an interesting one, and I do think that, were there the time, ED should have been a story driven movie, exploring the idea it does. That would have been more successful.
im in ur
I thought the story was about societal conformance, pressure to be "normal", and the consequences for not doing so. (Death apparently.) Kind of makes sense that people trying to buck the system would make something like this.
I think the story is besides the point though. What's really impressed me is that the drove their software development through an actual project.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.