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Creative Commons Video Challenges Hollywood's Best
Supercharged_Z06 writes "A short film entitled Sintel was released by the Blender Foundation under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (YouTube link). It was created by an international team of artists working collaboratively using a free, open source piece of 3D rendering software called Blender. No Hollywood studio was involved in its making. Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent. If a short film of this quality can be produced without Hollywood right now, imagine what will appear a few more years down the road."
And this film is different from the dozens of award winning independent films produced outside of Hollywood every year how? Hollywood has a monopoly on "dedicated, creative talent" these days or something? Thats news to me, most of the stuff they make is crap IMO. Kudos on making it with open source software, double kudos for licensing it under CC but otherwise its nothing special.
You minimize the ways in which it is different with your hard to take seriously "kudos". I can share Blender Foundation movies with everyone I wish. I don't recall being able to share copies of Hollywood movies or most independently made movies without risking litigation. When the Blender Foundation makes their movies they improve Blender and show off its capabilities to inspire others to use the program. Few Hollywood movies have that result for FLOSS. The Blender Foundation raises its money from us, the viewing public, who is inspired to buy their stuff because they treat us so well. There is no such similar inspiration for Hollywood movies or independent features; I'd like to contribute to more documentary filmmakers but movie makers that let me share the work (even verbatim and non-commercially) have set the bar high enough where I can quickly exclude the vast majority from receiving a donation from me. On the other hand, I'll be ready to buy a credit or a gold sponsorship for the next Blender Foundation movie depending only on my personal finances. Blender Foundation has developed a reputation for helping our community in significant ways. These are big efforts in themselves and should be sufficient to answer your question.
Digital Citizen
Have you considered that you might be the problem? Maybe you're a little too dependent on Hollywood spoon-feeding to be able to actually pay attention to something?
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Pretty remarkable what can be generated these days with open source software and some dedicated, creative talent.
Yes, yes... but what can be generated with open source software WITHOUT any dedicated, creative talent? Isn't that the more important question here? Creative people can produce works of genius with no technology to speak of, so who cares about that. ;-P
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I don't get it, why? The story is pretty terrible and there were plenty of independent movies in history, not like it's a first at that. It's well done for a short story on private time and with limited funding on a computer. Is that the part that's so great about this movie?
Really, I am not certain what exactly I should be applauding to:
1. Pretty bad story?
2. Creative Commons license used?
3. Computer generated animation?
? Not totally sure.
You can't handle the truth.
The question here is that talent alone cannot create anything without the right tools. Artists shouldn't have to sell their souls to buy their supplies.
Van Gogh had to make his own paint because he was so poor he couldn't afford to buy it. Blender is Van Gogh's paint.
They're going to be distributing not just the movie, but everything you need to re-create the movie (or a derivative work). The movie itself is only 14 minutes long, but the full distribution takes 4 DVDs! All under a CC license. Hard to see how you could call this anything but an open source movie!
it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
Funny, that's what they used to say about programmers! And, of course, no musician has ever put on, say, a benefit concert for charity. Everyone knows that true artists are motivated entirely by money and nothing else.
[Mild spoiler alert]
Is there anywhere on an earthlike world where a desert, a dense jungle, and snowcapped mountains are within hiking distance? And where everyone speaks the same language?
The whole point of the movie is that Sintel's quest took so long that the dragon was already fully grown by the time she finished it. As for everyone speaking English, that's not too realistic given how English, French and Spanish-speaking countries are so widely spaced out in our world.
The movies (and games) that the Blender Foundation sponsors serve two purposes.
First, they act as a showcase for the technologies currently available.
Secondly, and far more important for the software, the work flow and features required by modern animation teams drives the development of the Blender on. Sintel is built with the latest generation of Blender - 2.5 - which is still in beta. The requirements of Sintel have been developed in Blender in tandem.
Someone said 'it looks like a game trailer'. While I suspect it was intended as a put-down, it is actually a tremendous compliment. Modern computer games pack huge artistic and development muscle, cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and pull in the technical muscle of huge companies. That Blender can enable a small team of deveopers, animators and digital artists to produce something like shows the capabilities of the team and the software.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
What wasn't completely obvious was the time frame. Although they tried to make her look older, one has no way to gauge how much time had passed, she looked like a plastic doll throughout the whole film.
When the big dragon caught the small dragon in flight, it was pretty clear that it was the parent getting the child back.
Perhaps that was the whole idea, but looking at it from her perspective the whole story is stupid. Obviously, she would know exactly how long ago it had been since her dragon had been snatched away from her. Did she think her little dragon wouldn't grow up?
Considering that Pixar started off as a software development company who wanted to do some demonstration projects to show off their tools, that is certainly a valid point after a fashion. That they somehow were able to hire some excellent talent (after George Lucas dumped them.... thank goodness for that) and after a bit of shrewd business dealings were able to get a CEO of a major entertainment company fired (Michale Eisner) and take over a sizable chunk of the Walt Disney Corporation in the process of merely "demonstrating" their technical capabilities.... yeah I guess you could say that producing something with the tools can make a bit of a difference.
I don't know how much Pixar makes off of their "RenderMan" software suite, but the movies that they've made have pulled in a couple billion dollars over the history of the company. The argument that making demonstration projects as a way to push the software certainly has been proven true even if the "demonstrations" end up being successful in their own right. It also helps to show that you shouldn't be willing to settle for 2nd rate quality when the best is available.
[...] it does lack a number of very important features for professional work. But it's perfectly competent within it's limitations. I don't use it, I use Photoshop because I need some of those important features
For over ten years now, whenever GIMP is compared to Photoshop somewhere on the net, invariably someone comes out of the woodwork claiming that GIMP lacks "certain professional features". Every time, I inquire politely what these features might be. What is it that "professionals" do or need that the GIMP can not do or provide?
I have never gotten an answer. Not once.
The one thing that is invariably mentioned is that Photoshop somehow allows you to work in a cmyk space. Which is of course the mark of the UNprofessional hack, since real professionals worry about light. Composition. Art. And leave the technology details of the print process to a bit of code that does the cmyk separation after the fact (which the GIMP has been doing for many years).
I have thus given up. I have concluded that those who claim some kind of "missing professional features" are just tools that have been duped into shelling out major dollars for an image editor; with capabilities that they could have gotten for free.
You too, as usual, claim some vague "features" that the GIMP is supposedly lacking. Which is a lie, of course: if there were any truth to it you would have mentioned such features to strengthen your point. Which you can't, because you've never actually used the GIMP.
Right now, of course, you're frantically googling in an attempt to find some such features you can then post here in some childish attempt to show me wrong. And of course you will deny having done so. 'Tis par for the course on the internets, I guess.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
I think you may just suck at basic math..
Lack of greater than 24 bit color is a deal killer for me. In my photo workflow, the raw images are 36 or 42 bit color and I prefer that my edits preserve as much detail as possible. There's a lot of shadow and highlight detail that is lost as soon as you drop to 24 bit color. I've also been very frustrated every time I try the raw support in GIMP. I use Bibble for workflow processing and there's no comparison between GIMP and Bibble (Linux version). For workflow, the UI of GIMP is useless.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Yeah but how well are the Blender Foundation Artists living?
Do they have health insurance? Can they pay their rent? Or at they doing this largely out the kindness of their hearts? The largest cost for most animation studios is the talent not the software. Our software licenses are less than 1% of our annual expenditures. And since our software makes us considerably more than 1% more productive than the free alternatives that's not really a cost at all so much as it's an investment.
There is a saying in production "Computer time is cheap." It's not the large $10m render farm that costs a lot of money it's the 5,000 artists setting up the scenes to render.
I've worked on a lot of low to no budget films before and I always get annoyed and pretty pissed off when the director then goes around saying that the movie was only made for "$xxx,000". "Yeah sure you can make a movie for nothing when I donate tends of thousands of dollars worth of my time and equipment for free."
It's those MPAA distributed films that allow me to donate my time and talent to projects that I want to help out on. It's the big budget films that feed and house most of the crew and talent on low budget indie films.
You're joking.. no MGM rep would ever buy such bad CGI for release in theater, not even as a intermittance movie.. I do congratulate you on your effort to produce something, but it's very amateuristic.. IMHO this whole story just seems to me as an attempt to get some attention to yourself and your little production. And especially your remark about them stealing it from your house, no self respecting corporation would ever steal such an amateuristic production. And if htey really did steal it from your house while you were asleep, why didn't you call the cops?
Yeah but how well are the Blender Foundation Artists living?
Do they have health insurance? Can they pay their rent? Or at they doing this largely out the kindness of their hearts?
They are doing it out of the desire to create. The motives involving money, either making it ("health insurance and rent"), or spending it ("out of the kindness of their hearts") never enter into it.
Layer groups, for one. Shapes for another. Variable text anti-aliasing for another. A sane MDI interface that lets find images and draw at the edge of the image without a lot of silly window resizing etc. for another.
Really, this was a question before Photoshop CS. Gimp has LARGELY caught up to OLD photoshops, but if you've looked at Photoshop recently, it's leaped ahead by miles. I know the unstable version of Gimp has a few of these features, but they're not stable yet afaik, and have been so long coming that it's difficult to see how your argument about not seeing the difference for ten years is well considered.
Health insurance is free in Europe.
So you like fantasy films about the unbelievable, the supernatural, genocide, murder, homophobia, misogyny, magic - hollywood gives you that but not necessarily in one film.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Not free, payed by taxes. Don't get me wrong, I support public health care, but it is in no way free.
And yet you don't post anything specific and just whine.
You mean it's mandatory and often government-run.
There is no such thing as free health insurance.
Problem is that some of these "missing features" could very well by patented , so they can't be implemented in open source projects , even if they would want too.
Slipping shoelaces ?
The closest I have seen to an argument was color management including pantone, but then I realized something there. The argument was that with color management the monitor can be calibrated and pantone colors used so that the graphic designer sees exactly what the printed version will look like. In turn, that is critical because that's what the final viewers will see.
Then I realized it's bunk. The final viewer will view the printed image an any combination of natural sunlight, crappy to good fluorescent light, incandescent light, halogen light, with or without tinted glasses. The people viewing it may or may not perceive colors exactly the same way as the artist. Some will be color blind. Some will think everything looks bluish. The one least likely condition it will ever again be viewed under is a perfectly calibrated monitor (or pristine paper printed with fresh ink never degraded by UV) with perfectly colored lights by a trained eye.
I can easily pick up any two pieces of media depicting Superman's cape, put them side by side and see that they do NOT match perfectly. Does everyone just really suck at it or is my point perhaps valid?
All you're really saying is that the obsessive-compulsive use of particular color management is deemed necessary because it is deemed necessary.
Then, of course there's the question of under what conditions must Superman's cape be exactly that color? Bright arc light, incandescent, sunlight on a perfectly clear day, Earth or Krypton? What if there's a shadow? Will it be the same in every cinema without regard for the age of the projector bulb or the condition of the screen? How's that work out when it gets converted to NTSC (Never Twice the Same Color)
For the print version, would that be at the beginning of the run or the end? On which lot of pulp paper? Before or after the ink ages in? Or is it only later when it gets compiled into a graphic novel on the slick paper?
Now that the typical home reader has switched from incandescent "soft white" to the CF (either cheap "cool white" or "daylight" type with a CRI in the 80s), what changes has the industry made to compensate?
If none, either they're asleep at the switch or the importance of the color match is exaggerated.
No it does not do HDR and neither does Photoshop.
Both would be a lot closer if they started ignoring all the morons who think making integer levels have more than 8 bits is useful, like about 50 posts above complaining about Gimp's lack of what they call "48-bit color" (really 12-bit color).
If you have 16 bits it is moronic to use it for anything other than IEEE half floating point format. Many times more moronic if you have 32 bits!